Worst of Cybersecurity Reporting 2021

Track 1
4 Feb 2022 2:00 PM - 3:00PM

In this session, two tech writers who roasted the worst tech reporting of 2019 and 2020 are back on the grill to discuss...the worst tech reporting of 2021! This year we’ve broken down the top media fails into four cardinal sins: not reading or understanding a company’s privacy policy/terms of use, taking press releases at face value, being unclear about relevant details, and relying on sources without domain expertise. But this bleeds into the tech sector as well: before journalists misrepresent a company privacy policy, the company itself often misleads its own users (by error or by design). And who is responsible for writing those press releases that sometimes get parroted in the first place? We’ll see what we can learn from the year’s biggest fails, and how journalists and hackers can work together to make security reporting suck a little bit less in 2022.

Yael Grauer
investigative tech reporter
@yaelwrites
https://blog.yaelwrites.com

Yael Grauer is an investigative tech reporter covering privacy and security, digital freedom and mass surveillance. She’s written for Ars Technica, Insider, Slate, Popular Science, Vice, Wired, and other publications. She’s co-organized events and spoken on panels about digital security, source protection, ethics, and more. She holds a Master of Mass Communication degree from ASU, which was an interesting way to kill time between DEF CONs.

David Huerta
Digital Security Trainer at Freedom of the Press Foundation
@huertanix

David Huerta is a Digital Security Trainer at the Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF), where he trains journalists in privacy-enhancing technology to empower a free press. He’s taught hundreds of trainings across the world and organizes the an annual series of workshops on digital security at the National Association of Hispanic Journalists (NAHJ) conference. He's written for Motherboard, The Outline and FPF’s own security blog. He also dropped out of ASU in 2010 to co-found HeatSync Labs, Arizona’s first hackerspace.