
We unpack how some password managers can be tricked into coughing up your secrets, with a clickjacking sleight-of-hand, what website owners can do to prevent it, and how to lock down your personal password vault.
Then we time-hop to the post-quantum scramble: “harvest-now, decrypt later”, Microsoft’s 2033 quantum-safe pledge, and whether your printer will survive the update apocalypse.
All this, plus a gloriously dodgy URL “shadyfier,” and turning the iconic iMac G4 into a modern media hub.
All this and more is discussed in the latest edition of the “Smashing Security” podcast by cybersecurity veteran and keynote speaker Graham Cluley, joined this week by special guest Thom Langford.
Warning: This podcast may contain nuts, adult themes, and rude language.
Show full transcript ▼
This transcript was generated automatically, probably contains mistakes, and has not been manually verified.
You'll hear no discussion of how distraction, lack of training, and burnout — not technical complexity — are the factors driving most breaches.
And we won't even mention how the governor of Nevada has warned that state offices are closed, websites offline, and phone lines up the swanny following a suspected ransomware attack.
So, Thom, what are you going to be talking about this week?
Now, chums, passwords, absolute bloody nightmare, aren't they?
Is it password123? Is it 123password? Is it password1234? It's, what could it be? It happens to men of our age, doesn't it, Thom? It does. It does.
They remember your passwords for you, so your puny human brain, I'm not looking at you, Thom, your puny human brain doesn't have to remember it.
So password managers, really good for remembering your passwords if your memory's gone to shot.
They're also really good at generating strong, unique passwords, which is of course what you really should be using, because it's a disaster if you use the same password or something similar over and over and over again.
Or if you have one really strong password that you've memorised. Some people do have strong passwords, but they've only got one. Maybe you've used a— I can't say mnemonic. Mnemonic.
Yes, maybe you've— mnemonic. Maybe you've memorised some method, your weird, crazy gibberish password, but you then use it for everything.
And that's daft because all it's gonna take is one data breach, and the bad guys are gonna have your password, and they'll be able to unlock your entire online life and terrifying consequences.
Well, it's also something else as well, isn't it?
And if that site is not storing it correctly, yes, it might be a data breach, but under normal circumstances, it would take the attackers a decade to break your password if it's encrypted, salted hash, blah blah, all that together.
But if the site you're using it on is a bit daft, then it could be being stored in plaintext or with really poor encryption.
They look at the domain that your web browser is visiting and they won't offer to enter your password unless you're on the real website.
So if you go to Lloyds Bank, it's only going to offer to enter your Lloyds Bank password if you are on the Lloyds Bank domain.
But you can also add in aliases.
So if you go to dodgybank.com rather than bank.com, it shouldn't offer to fill your password in for bank.com.
But unfortunately, some of them can still be tricked into helpfully handing over your passwords and other sensitive information, such as your credit card details, to the bad guys, to the cybercriminals.
And that is what my story is about today, because a security researcher from the Czech Republic called Marek Toth described at the DEF CON security conference this month how, if you have a browser-based password manager extension like those available from 1Password, LastPass, Bitdefender, NordPass, etc., etc., ad nauseam, how those extensions can be tricked into coughing up your secrets and handing them straight to the bad guys.
So what happens is this, this security researcher, he described how a browser-based password manager extension like those we've discussed can be tricked into coughing up your secrets.
And this is how the attack happens. Imagine you are on a website and you go to the website. One of the first things you see is effectively a popup.
A little thing pops up in front of the website, which says, click here to make it go away. So it could be something an irritating cookie consent popup.
And you see those sort of things when you visit Instagram or TikTok in your browser, or it could be something the Cloudflare, are you a human challenge page? The CAPTCHA. Yeah.
You know, it's fairly common. I sometimes go to webpages and Google will say, oh, you know, are you really, you're not logged into your Google account.
You know, you have to agree on this. And you see all this Google branded thing which appears there and you have to say, yes, of course, I'm just loading Google to the page.
And so you click on it, don't you? Because who doesn't do that? But surprise, surprise, a hacker has secretly slipped in underneath that pop-up an invisible login form.
And your trusty password manager, bless its silicone socks, sees that form. Oh, interesting. Yeah. Sees that form and thinks, oh, let me save you some time.
Here is Thom's password and his credit card details and his inside leg measurement. So let me just step— that's scary in itself, but I'm going to go into the weeds now.
I'm going to get a little bit nerdy. You know how—
We're both super cyber nerds.
It had a name a bit like the site you wanted to log into, or you received a phishing email with some HTML hijinks, which made you think that you were going somewhere, and in fact, you were taken somewhere else.
This webpage has been created by cybercriminals like a regular phishing page, and they've led you there through this malicious link.
Now, normally when you visit a page like that, your password manager can help you.
Normally, if you visit a legitimate page where you would want to log in, it would inject a little autofill pop-up into the web page.
A little thing will pop up inside the web page, a little button which says, "Do you want me to enter your details?
Do you want me to fill these in for you?" But this is a dodgy website which contains on it what is known as an invisible frame, known as an iframe, which contains the login page of the real legitimate website.
The real legitimate website is kind of embedded inside this dangerous website. And that iframe— Ah, I see. Now you're getting it.
That iframe has been made effectively invisible to the naked eye through the use of JavaScript, the CSS setting is basically set to opacity zero.
And that means you can't see that the real thing is there. The attacker shows something like a fake cookie banner or a confirm your human box to cover the real autofill popup.
And when you click, when you click on the button to remove the cookie banner or the CAPTCHA, what you're actually clicking on is not a harmless button.
Your click is actually passed to the hidden autofill control that tells your password manager, go ahead and fill in Thom's password, credit card details, two-factor codes here.
And they get filled into a hidden form that the attacker controls. They collect it and you didn't see a thing was being taken.
And then I have to do the Touch ID or the secondary authentication. So I actually have to manually, not manually, but you know what I mean?
My second factor is my fingerprint at the end of the day. So if that's in place, okay, if you force that as a protective measure.
Does that at least warn you that even though you are clicking into a fake form, that it's trying to fill in a username and password behind without you seeing it?
Now you are a fancy pants Apple user who's got all this fingerprint ID, Touch ID sort of stuff set up.
Many of the rest of us mere mortals, the average person, does not have all that set up.
And I suspect as well, yes, inside many password managers, there may not be an option to do that, or it is not enabled by default.
Therefore, I'm thinking, oh, something's happening. I must need to touch, not necessarily question it.
Although, remember, you clicked on a link expecting to go to this particular website, perhaps. Yes. I mean, that is a—
And so you might think, well, this is okay for me to do. That is also a potential. So yes, what we need are more safety nets. These criminals are clever. They are clever.
So your password, your card info, even your two-factor security codes are getting filled into a hidden form. You didn't see a thing was being taken.
What you can see is a big cookie consent form pop up on your screen or some kind of CAPTCHA.
Something else which is irritating, apparently legitimate clicks on the apparently safe visible elements of that web page are actually intercepted by the hidden iframe. Yeah.
And the credential theft has occurred. So this is a bit of a problem.
So if you have a website which can be hacked, how can you prevent users of your website being duped in this fashion?
And what you can do is you can set options in your HTTP headers that say that the site cannot, is forbidden to be put in an iframe, and your web browsers will obey those and say, well, hang on, this particular webpage doesn't allow this site to be put into an iframe, and so I'm not going to allow it.
You can also say, look, my site can be put in an iframe, but only on my domain name. Yeah.
So if you were part of smashingsecurity.com, smashingsecurity.com maybe allows other bits of smashingsecurity.com to put itself into an iframe.
We don't actually do that as far as I know, but—
You can also set a content security policy on your website, which is a more modern way of preventing your site from being put in an iframe.
And some websites, they want to be embedded on other sites. It's part of their business model. So Google, for instance. Yes. YouTube. Yeah.
People want to be able to embed videos on their blogs, on their news sites, on social media, Google Maps.
People want to be able to embed Google Maps, Spotify, Twitter, TikTok, all those sort of things. They want to be embedded.
So yeah, you can have a blanket ban of nobody can embed our stuff, but that would kill half of the internet's content.
What you can do instead then is you can separate your safe-to-embed web pages from the ones which aren't safe to embed.
So, for instance, a login page on YouTube or Google cannot be embedded.
If you were running a bank, why on earth would you allow any of your web pages to be embedded somewhere else? It just sounds like you're asking for trouble.
You can turn off autofill for sensitive stuff like passwords and credit card details.
Sounds like, you know, in a way you have turned off autofill, Thom, because it requires your fingerprint to go forward.
I've told my password manager not to do it automatically, so I have to do a further fill-on-click agreement.
So when it tries to fill something in, rather than doing it automatically, the actual browser has a little thing inside the browser context where I say, yes, this is okay for this extension to fill these details in.
So I would be suspicious. You can obviously keep your password manager updated because some have been updated to protect against this.
And in Chrome and Edge and Brave, if you're using those browsers, many people are obviously using Chrome, you can set extensions, including password managers, to basically operate on click only so they don't silently inject autofill.
So you may only want to turn them on when you want to turn them on. So this researcher, he tested 11 popular password managers.
He found that nearly all of them were vulnerable to this trick to a greater or lesser extent. And he told them about it back in April.
And some like Dashlane and Keeper and NordPass and ProtonPass and RoboForm, they fixed it quickly. Others are dragging their heels a little bit.
But yeah, you would like to think that they would have done it by now.
So right now for some people, and it's estimated millions and millions of people are relying on these things, and rightly so because we've been encouraging it for years on your podcast, the only thing standing between them and disaster is the hope that they don't click on a suspicious accept cookies button, which, let's be honest— We all do anyway, don't we?
Frankly.
And if you're a user, don't let your password manager fill stuff automatically without your explicit say-so or without the thumbprint of Thom Langford.
So, you know, between, I don't know, maybe sort of 7 to 15 years in the future is when the experts think that quantum computing will be mainstream.
And quantum computing is, I was gonna say the next step in sort of computing evolution. Although it's actually more like a revolution.
It's fundamentally more powerful by orders of magnitude, massive orders of magnitude. Things that may have taken a supercomputer today 10,000 years to do.
We mentioned cryptography and how, you know, you can break passwords if you set a supercomputer onto it for 10 years, you can get a password out of it from an encrypted password file.
A quantum computer will do it in seconds or minutes because of that exponentially massive growth.
So from a security perspective, all of our existing cryptography, even the highest level of cryptography today, is potentially going to just be blasted through by quantum computers.
And that's not going to change.
In a few years, all we're gonna hear about is quantum because more and more computers will be quantum. Microsoft just recently launched a quantum chip.
I say launched, it's not you can go down to Curry's and buy it, but it's a pretty little gold thing that needs to be refrigerated or stored in a room the size of, well, a small house basically to keep it cool to run.
Although that's changing, you know, quantum chips are now starting to operate at room temperature.
'Cause that's the thing, you had to chill a quantum computer down to absolute zero in order for it to work. Progressions have been made that means it doesn't matter.
So anyway, experts therefore say in 7 to 15 years, quantum computing will be maybe in the household, who knows, maybe even be in a phone, you just don't know.
I mean, it's Moore's Law writ large here. So researchers are very concerned and cybersecurity people are very concerned about this. So we need to be quantum ready effectively.
And what Microsoft has bravely announced that by 2033, that's 8 years, and quite a few hundred Patch Tuesdays from now that its products will be quantum safe.
Corporate speak for we'll worry about the apocalypse later, but here's a press release to make us look futuristic today. What do they mean by quantum safe?
What I mean by quantum safe is that their products, their computers, etc., will not be able to be taken advantage of by quantum computing in the way that we've just mentioned.
They will have their own encryption methods, or at least what we might term as encryption today, who knows in 8 years' time, that will not be broken by quantum.
Presumably it's quantum encryption, which will therefore take a quantum computer 10,000 years to break.
The pitch is that hackers are harvesting encrypted data now so that they can decrypt it later.
So we talked in the last story about, you know, not all sites store data properly, most sites do, and they store it in encrypted hash salted blah, blah, blah kind of way in such a way that it takes 10,000 years to get a password out of it.
Hackers know this, they're just harvesting it anyway because at some point they will be able to use a quantum computer to decrypt that data in seconds.
So because most people will not change their passwords over the next 5 years on many sites because they're not prompted to, why would they?
They might reuse a password to your previous point. They might have a secure password, but they use it a number of different times.
So it might be 128 different characters, but they use it on 10 different sites or 100 different sites and don't change it because, hey, it's secure.
Well, in 5 years' time it won't be, or 8 years' time or whatever.
And also, most people who don't listen to this podcast but maybe friends or family of people who listen to this podcast, are just still using, you know, password123.
Of course, Microsoft is working with global standards bodies, which sounds great until you just realize that's just a decade of committees and meetings about acronyms.
But by the time they agree on what to call it, quantum computers will be teaching our grandchildren how to bypass login screens. Simple as that.
By 2033, half of us won't even be using today's systems anyway.
And the other half will still be waiting for Windows Update to finish installing, or we have to, you know, shutting down your computer. Please wait, do not turn off your computer.
So it sounds great, but if history tells us anything, the real threat isn't quantum computing, it's Microsoft rolling out another update that breaks your printer again.
I'm telling you, it's for security.
Every week, tens of thousands of people tune in to hear me talk about hackers, scams, the latest blunders that make you wonder how some people ever got hired in cybersecurity.
But here's the clever bit: your business can sponsor this podcast.
That means your brand gets promoted directly to an audience of security professionals, decision makers, and people who actually know what a firewall is, unlike your CEO.
Sponsoring Smashing Security is simple.
I read your message, listeners hear it, and you look like a genius for choosing the one podcast that manages to make cybercrime both informative and funny.
So before you blow this year's marketing budget on branded stress balls or throwaway socks, visit smashingsecurity.com/sponsor and let's chat. That's smashingsecurity.com/sponsor.
Okay, back to the show. And welcome back, and you join us at our favorite part of the show, the part of the show that we call Pick of the Week.
Could be a funny story, a book that they've read, a TV show, a movie, a record, a podcast, a website, or an app, whatever they wish.
It doesn't have to be security-related necessarily. Better not be. My Pick of the Week this week, well, it is kind of security-related.
In fact, I was talking earlier on, wasn't I, about phishing and, you know, dodgy links and things like that. And people play around with them.
And a lot of people will shorten a link, won't they? They will use a service like Bitly, I suppose, is a famous one to create a shortened link.
You don't really know where you're going until you've gone to it. It could be anywhere on the web and, oh my word, wherever I ended up.
Well, I found a cute little website which might appeal to some people, and other people might be absolutely appalled by it. It is a website where you can shadeify a URL.
Rather than shorten it, you can make it a bit more shady. So you can turn your URL into something which looks super sketchy. And this was put together by a guy—
If you can see the link there in front of you, Thom, why don't you go to the link? Okay.
When you go to the link, you can enter a URL and it will turn it into something which is probably going to be longer and hopefully would set the alarm bells of your users ringing enormously that they shouldn't click on it.
So you give it a try, Thom, and see what you get shown.
So I don't know if this should be a pick of the week or a nitpick of the week, whichever it is. I thought you should be aware of it. Or a do not click of the week. But there you go.
So that is how you shadeify your URL. Links in the show notes. Nice. Thom, what's your pick of the week?
So I am here to talk to you about a company called Juicy Crumb, who have produced a little product called the Docklite G4. Now, let's go back 20-plus years into Apple history.
Do you remember, this is before Apple even moved on to the Intel chip, they were still running the PowerPC chip. Yes. They'd released their plastic PowerPC Macs.
Do you remember the, there was the ones that looked like colourful toilet seats, and then they had the CRT monitors in plastic. That was the G3 version. Yes. Do you remember those?
It was a half dome with an articulated arm and the screen on the end. Some people called it the sunflower edition. It was an anglepoised lamp, wasn't it, in a way?
It's an anglepoised lamp, and it's a thing of beauty. In fact, I'm looking at two of mine at the moment. You've got one?
Anyway, these run PowerPC G4. The lower versions can only take a gig of RAM. They normally ship to 256 meg. That's how long ago.
Because all the certificates have expired. Unsupported operating system, et cetera, et cetera. But they are a thing of beauty.
However, what Juicy Crumb have done is create this product, the Docklite G4.
And what you do, you open it up, put it on its face, open up its bottom, you take out the innards, you put in their board, right? Which all aligns up properly. Yeah.
Put it back together. You have now got a USB-connected monitor. Monitor. A monitor. And some space inside of that dome to put whatever you want in there that would fit.
So, for instance, somebody got the insides of an M2 Mac Mini. So, not the smallest one, but the larger Mac Mini, as it were. Right. An M2 Silicon Mac Mini.
He said, the screw holes actually line up. Mounted that inside the Half Dome underneath. No.
Hooked in the HDMI, hooked up the USB, then had a fully working M2 Mac in the Sunflower G4. In the classic. The classic format.
So you can use your old keyboard, your old mouse, your old speakers. You can keep it looking genuinely retro. I'm putting an Apple TV inside of mine. Right.
Because as we were talking just before the show, I'm buying a new house. I fancy having a TV in the kitchen. Not just any TV. I want a retro Mac TV. Oh. How cool is this?
I'm sure lots of our listeners would love to find out what you're up to and follow you online. What's the best way to do that?
Terrific.
And don't forget, to ensure you never miss another episode, follow Smashing Security in your favorite podcast app, such as Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Pocket Casts.
For episode show notes, sponsorship info, guest lists, and the entire back catalog of more than 430-odd episodes, check out smashingsecurity.com. Until next time, cheerio, bye-bye.
I'm grateful to Thom Langford for joining me on this episode and to the chums who've signed up for Smashing Security Plus and support the podcast via Patreon.
They include Matt Cotton, Alan Liska, Jan, David Smith, or is it David Smythe? He's got a Y in it.
Anyway, Jason B, Simon Yakan, Mike Hallett, Dimitri, Rich, Sammy Dosa, Matthew Hunt, John Morris, Bunky Duck, Lars, Chip, and Jacob Lofgren.
If you'd like your name to be one of those read out on the credits from time to time, that is just one of the simple pleasures you can earn yourself by joining Smashing Security Plus.
You sign up for as little as $5 a month. You get your name read out every now and then, but you also get early access to Smashing Security episodes and occasional bonus content.
And by the way, those early episodes don't have any ads in them. Wonderful. Just go to smashingsecurity.com/plus for more details. Now, I realize that times are tough.
There's not a lot of money rattling around, is there? So don't feel any pressure to become a patron. You can also support the podcast in other ways.
You can like, you can subscribe, you can give 5-star reviews if you're feeling generous, and perhaps jot down a few words to try to entice people to give the podcast a listen.
But you know what you also can do is just tell someone about the podcast. Tell them that you like it.
Anything that gets the podcast in front of more people makes the effort all worthwhile. Well, that just about wraps up the show for this week. So thanks once again for listening.
I really do appreciate it, and until next week, cheerio, bye-bye.
Host:
Graham Cluley:
Guest:
Thom Langford:
Episode links:
- DOM-based Extension Clickjacking: Your Password Manager Data at Risk – Marek Tóth.
- Major password managers can leak logins in clickjacking attacks – Bleeping Computer.
- Microsoft to Make All Products Quantum Safe by 2033 – Infosecurity Magazine.
- Shady URL.
- DockLite G4 – Juicy Crumb.
- I perfected the iMac G4 – YouTube.
- Smashing Security merchandise (t-shirts, mugs, stickers and stuff)
- Support us on Patreon!
Support the show:
You can help the podcast by telling your friends and colleagues about “Smashing Security”, and leaving us a review on Apple Podcasts or Podchaser.
Become a Patreon supporter for ad-free episodes and our early-release feed!
Follow us:
Follow the show on Bluesky, or join us on the Smashing Security subreddit, or visit our website for more episodes.
Thanks:
Theme tune: “Vinyl Memories” by Mikael Manvelyan.
Assorted sound effects: AudioBlocks.

