My education on the ins and outs of the Victorian criminal justice system began with the Criminal Procedure Act. Included with my charge sheet were some instructions on how I could ge more information from the informant about the charge, in my case a police officer from the Traffic Camera Office. Following these instructions, I sent the officer in question an email with my list of things I wanted him to provide.

So I decided to challenge an infringement notice for speeding, what now? In my previous post I briefly described the grounds on which I intended to challenge my infringement notice, in this post I’ll talk through the beginning of what turned out to be a long and drawn out process. Firstly, I’d like to make one thing absolutely clear - you should ALWAYS challenge an infringement notice. The ecconomic viability of the entire system is predicated on the assumption that most people will just pay.

We’ve all heard the old adage “Never bring a knife to a gunfight”. It can be adapted to all sorts of situations. Recently I learned that you shouldn’t bring cybersecurity to a legal fight either. Over my next few posts I’m going to tell you a story about how I tried to use my expertise in cybersecurity to challenge a speeding fine, and failed horribly. It was however a very educational and interesting experience, and unless you happen to be a real lawyer (like I wasn’t) you will probably learn a few things that surprise you if you follow along.

One of the biggest issues in cybersecurity this year has been third party assurance, particularly when it comes to big businesses working with smaller ones. The Accepted Wisdom among cybersecurity professionals for a few years now has been that the easiest way to hack a big company is usually by hacking a smaller service provider or contractor first. To deal with this threat, enterprise organisations did what they do best: come up with a complicated and inflexible assessment and compliance framework and then tried to apply equally it to every third party they have any kind of relationship with.

A couple of weeks ago the folks over at Privasec RED posted a series of challenges on their official Twitter account. Normally I ignore this sort of thing but the third challenge caught my attention - decrypt a the contents of an encrypted tweet, and win a fabulous prize - a 1 month subscription to Hack the Box. Actually, the prize wasn’t really important, I just couldn’t resist a good crypto puzzle, so I decided to have a crack.