Phreaks and Geeks: Joybubbles and the Pre-History of Hacking
The proto hacker whose innate ability, curiosity, and absolute joy in the act of discovery is conveyed so artfully in the new documentary Joybubbles.
Author Bio
Dennis Fisher
Editor
Dennis Fisher is an award-winning journalist and author. He is one of the co-founders of Decipher and Threatpost and has been writing about cybersecurity since 2000. Dennis enjoys finding the stories behind the headlines and digging into the motivations and thinking of both defenders and attackers. He is the author of 2.5 novels and once met Shaq. Contact: dennis at decipher.sc.
Featured Articles
Fortinet and WinRAR Exploitation, Google’s IPIDEA Disruption, and Our Favorite Cybersecurity Creators
It was a busy week in the cybers! Today we start with the targeted exploitation of another Fortinet vulnerability (CVE-2026-24858) that enables simple authentication bypass (1:15), then we discuss Google’s disruption of a large residential proxy network called IPIDEA that has been abused by hundreds of threat actors (5:40), then we talk about the continued attacks on an older WinRAR […]
Google Disrupts IPIDEA Residential Proxy Network
Google researchers observed more than 550 individual threat groups using IPIDEA exit nodes during a one-week period earlier this month.
Cybercrime and APT Groups Exploiting WinRAR Bug
Exploitation of CVE-2025-8088 in the wild began before disclosure, with attacks confirmed as early as July 18, 2025.
Microsoft Releases Emergency Patch for CVE-2026-21509
The vulnerability (CVE-2026-21509) requires user interaction for an attack to succeed, with the most likely vector being an attacker sending a malicious Office file to a victim, who then opens it.
Fortinet FortiGate Devices Targeted in New Campaign
This activity shares some similarities with a campaign that researchers at Arctic Wolf identified in December. That campaign started soon after Fortinet disclosed two authentication bypass flaws (CVE-2025-59718 and CVE-2025-59719).