How websites are tracking you with silence

Danny Palmer (0:03)

As I'm sure you've seen, in many cases, a company will put out a rather generic statement, saying they've been hit by a sophisticated cyber attack.

Graham Cluley (0:12)

Yeah, no one wants to get hit by a dumb attack, do they? No one wants to.

SPEAKER_3 (0:27)

Smashing Security, Episode 484 How websites are tracking you with silence, with Graham Cluley and special guest Danny Palmer.

Graham Cluley (0:37)

Hello, hello and welcome to Smashing Security Episode 484 My name's Graham Cluley.

Danny Palmer (0:42)

And I'm Danny Palmer.

Graham Cluley (0:43)

Danny, thank you so much for joining us once again. It was a pleasure to see you here on the podcast.

Danny Palmer (0:50)

My pleasure. Thanks for having me once more.

Graham Cluley (0:52)

Terrific to have you here.

SPEAKER_3 (0:56)

This week on Smashing Security…

Graham Cluley (0:58)

We won't be talking about how Berlin city government's ransomware attacks started with a fake cloud flare capture.

SPEAKER_3 (1:07)

You'll hear no discussion of…

Graham Cluley (1:08)

How France has arrested two suspects for hacking the country's tax agency.

And we won't even mention… How hackers are stealing clawed tokens from subscribers. So Danny, what are you going to be talking about this week?

Danny Palmer (1:24)

I'll be talking about new advice from cyber intelligence agencies, which encourages companies which fall victim to cyber-tracks to avoid using PR fluff to describe what happened.

Graham Cluley (1:34)

And I'll be finding out how the sound of silence could be helping to track you across the internet. All this and much more coming up on this episode of Smashing Security.

Now Danny, quick question for you before we get started today. How good is your hearing? Have you got quite good hearing?

Danny Palmer (1:55)

I don't think I do, you know, which is not a great thing because my eyesight is terrible to begin with.

Graham Cluley (2:01)

Oh Danny.

Danny Palmer (2:01)

You'd hope that my ears would pick up a bit more like a daredevil superhero. He's blind and he can hear and sense things really well.

Graham Cluley (2:08)

Yes.

Danny Palmer (2:08)

I don't have that ability. I get by the world, but I don't think you need me for listening for something really, really far away.

Graham Cluley (2:14)

Maybe you have another super sense though, even if your eyesight isn't that great and your hearing isn't that great. Maybe you've got, I don't know, a fantastic sense of taste.

Danny Palmer (2:24)

I can identify certain types of food. I'm not talking about, oh, that's a curry and that's spaghetti. But I could probably tell you what sort of beer was what vaguely, if you gave me some blind tasting. But no, nothing useful there, I'm afraid.

Graham Cluley (2:39)

Well, I'm not going to give you a beer-related game today. Instead, what I'm going to do is I'm going to play you a string of short sounds. Okay. And I want you to tell me what they are. And this is a game that I like to call Name That Chai. Listeners, you can play along as well and see how you do compared to Danny. So Danny, are you ready for round one?

Danny Palmer (3:03)

I am ready.

Graham Cluley (3:04)

We'll start off easy, shall we? What is this, Chai?

Danny Palmer (3:14)

That is the opening up of Windows back in the day, isn't it?

Graham Cluley (3:19)

Yes. Do you know which version of Windows that might be?

Danny Palmer (3:21)

Oh gosh. It's been so long. I would have kind of meld into one. I'm going to say 98

Graham Cluley (3:26)

Think it's Windows XP. I don't know what the difference. I mean, now we get to see. I've opened a can of worms here. Someone will say it's service pack number, whatever, 10B or something, won't they? But anyway, I think that's a win. I think that's close enough to me. All right, let's get a little bit harder.

Danny Palmer (3:46)

I do know that one. Yeah, that's the Nokia 3310 ringtone.

Graham Cluley (3:50)

Very good.

Danny Palmer (3:51)

My first mobile phone back in the day. So yeah, very familiar with that. We all had that as teens.

Graham Cluley (3:56)

It's an absolute classic. And my wife asked me, can I program her phone? Sounds like an old Nokia.

Danny Palmer (4:01)

Nice. Does she do that thing? Like, what's that show called?

Graham Cluley (4:04)

Dom Jolly, Trigger Happy TV.

Danny Palmer (4:06)

Shouting hello. Yeah.

Graham Cluley (4:09)

Okay. You're doing really good. Two out of two so far.

Danny Palmer (4:12)

Ace. I do recognize that, yeah.

Graham Cluley (4:24)

Right. People of a certain age will know that.