iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Lea Kissner @leak.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

"Building Safer Technology: A Field Guide to Failing Well" is here and you can get it wherever books are sold (35% discount code for you in this thread). I've spent 20 years dealing with terrible things on the Internet and I've learned a lot about how to build things which really *work*.

A pile of books with the title "Building Safer Technology: A field Guide to Failing Well" in a cardboard box

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Lea Kissner @leak.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

The Pinterest office has a really nifty 📌 giant red pushpin made of Lego📌 They were kind enough to invite me to speak yesterday and had over an hour of great questions, so I'm pretty sure that they liked the talk.

Person with n95 mask, glasses, and a beanie in front of a really huge red pushpin made of Lego

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Lea Kissner @leak.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

I can't believe that our book, "Building Safer Technology: A Field Guide to Failing Well" is here NOW. Learn how to build safely -- security, privacy, trust&safety, AI safety, etc. We concentrate on the underlying thinking and skills so this is durable knowledge even as technology changes.

Copy of the book "Building Safer Technology: A Field Guide to Failing Well"

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Lea Kissner @leak.bsky.social · 03/08/2026

From watching Career Ladder I've decided my job is like fugu sashimi because if you mess it up, someone will get hurt and many people would never touch it (On Career Ladder, the host tries to guess someone's job in 2 min and often asks what kind of food the job would be) youtube.com/shorts/0cc4V...

youtube.com

People HATE her job 🇧🇷 Ep. 607 🪜

YouTube video by Max Klymenko

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Lea Kissner @leak.bsky.social · 20/07/2026

HEY GUESS WHAT YOU CAN ATTACH A GIANT BRIM TO YOUR BIKE HELMET AND MAKE IT INTO A GIANT HAT!

Maniacally grinning person wearing a bike helmet with a large attached brim. Yes, I know that sounds odd. It is.

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Lea Kissner @leak.bsky.social · 10/07/2026

Did I mention that we've been writing a book? Fundamentally, security, privacy, trust&safety, AI safety -- all the fields aimed at dealing with dealing with how technical systems hurt people and how to avoid it -- share a foundation. We cover how to think and achieve *truly* effective practice. 1/

Cover of the book "Building Safer Technology: A Field Guide to Failing Well" by Yonatan Zunger, Lea Kissner, Neil Coles, Juan Pablo Hernandez, Harmony Mabrey, and Phillip Misner. Cover includes an illustration of a fuse repaired with kintsugi

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Lea Kissner @leak.bsky.social · 01/07/2026

What *does* a hacker look like to you? I probably shouldn't admit how many black hoodies I own, should I? (Spy Museum in NYC, BTW. My kids loved it.)

Person in a black hoodie standing in front of a wall with text asking "what does a hacker look like to you?"

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Lea Kissner @leak.bsky.social · 09/06/2026

I can't really walk this week for mysterious reasons* and boy is my dog happy with my inability to get into the office. * Literally I don't know why and the doctor doesn't have appointments for weeks. Please feel free to suggest good concierge doctors around Mountain View this is silly.

Very fluffy large black dog lying underneath my desk

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Lea Kissner @leak.bsky.social · 25/05/2026

Do you know what job is incredibly in-demand because of AI? Security. We're always trying to outrun the Internet, but the Internet got faster. The threat landscape has shifted radically at the same time as the attacks have accelerated. I chatted with @kateconger.com: www.nytimes.com/2026/05/24/t...

nytimes.com

One Job That Is Growing in the A.I. Era? Cybersecurity Experts.

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Lea Kissner @leak.bsky.social · 25/05/2026

I have learned a valuable lesson thanks to a Little Free Library in my neighborhood: the Daily Mail and I do not agree on what makes a good novel.

Picture of book endorsement on the cover of a novel from the Daily Mail: 'This is the season's word-of-mouth must-have book'

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Lea Kissner @leak.bsky.social · 24/05/2026

Companies are much more transparent about security and reliability bugs than privacy bugs. I've wanted solid data on this for a decade, but it's effectively impossible to get. 1/🧵 Obligatory notice: I'm not speaking about or on behalf of my employer. I'm speaking as someone who founded PEPR

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Lea Kissner @leak.bsky.social · 20/05/2026

Are you a privacy engineer or work with privacy engineers? Would you like to learn more about probably engineering? Boy do I have a conference for you! PEPR, the conference on privacy engineering, practice, and respect, is happening June 1-2 in Santa Clara, CA. www.usenix.org/conference/p...

usenix.org

PEPR '26

The 2026 USENIX Conference on Privacy Engineering Practice and Respect (PEPR '26) will take place on June 1–2, 2026. PEPR is focused on designing and building products and systems with privacy and res...

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Lea Kissner @leak.bsky.social · 27/04/2026

Spotted in the San Jose airport TSA bins: Delve comparing themselves to the TSA. Given the accusations leveled at Delve, I'm very amused by "AI can't prevent a secondary pat-down but it can find your SOC 2 evidence"

TSA items bin with ad for Delve compliance saying "AI can't prevent a secondary pat-down but it can find your SOC 2 evidence."

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Lea Kissner @leak.bsky.social · 13/04/2026

A few of us are (finally!) in the last stages of editing a new book 🎉 and the tentative title is "Creating Safety: How to build with new technologies without shooting yourself (and others) in the foot" Good title? Have a better one?

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Lea Kissner @leak.bsky.social · 09/04/2026

Security folks: have we considered *not* releasing security patches for the avalanche of bugs we're about to deal with? Hear me out. Given how much faster it's getting to reverse engineer an exploit from a patch and that we're expecting to fix *so* many bugs at once, maybe do a full release.

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Lea Kissner @leak.bsky.social · 08/04/2026

I don't want to tempt the evil eye or anything, but this paper I'm reviewing for USENIX Security looks amazing. In the good way.

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Lea Kissner @leak.bsky.social · 25/03/2026

Delve claims "Your CISO's cardiologist will thank you." Spoiler: they will not. www.inc.com/ben-sherry/t...

Advertising sign for Delve during RSA saying "Your CISO's cardiologist will thank you."

Spoiler: they will not

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Lea Kissner @leak.bsky.social · 12/03/2026

Incompetent social engineering or silly sales? Ring. Ring. "Hello". Hi! Is Lea Kissner there please? I'm sorry, they are not available. Can I take your information and have them call you back? This is Valerie calling from Dialexica. I represent them, and would like to talk to Lea.

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Lea Kissner @leak.bsky.social · 11/03/2026

We're looking for a director to handle a huge and fascinating scope with a 70+ person team in LinkedIn security: AI security, appsec, production security, security of the corporate systems, third party security, and handling the corporate identity services.

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Lea Kissner @leak.bsky.social · 02/03/2026

Are you selling a security product? Can you please do us both a favor and just tell me what it is? Just explain literally what it does and how. Risky Business was kind enough to start a catalogue with useful descriptions for their advertisers, but can we please normalize this? risky.biz/catalog/

risky.biz

Catalog - Risky Business Media

Catalog

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Lea Kissner @leak.bsky.social · 02/03/2026

People are people. Even if you disagree with them, even if they're confusing to you, even if they hurt you. If you watch people doing this, you can see them ripping out part of their soul. We aren't getting into a better world without *all* of us getting there.

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Lea Kissner @leak.bsky.social · 24/02/2026

My child has learned that when they yell "are you awake?" late at night the answer is "yes".

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Lea Kissner @leak.bsky.social · 17/02/2026

I too, have open questions for Lea.

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Lea Kissner @leak.bsky.social · 30/01/2026

Being willing to look stupid is a superpower

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Lea Kissner @leak.bsky.social · 28/01/2026

This is my biggest pet peeve about dashboards: what is someone going to *do* when they get this information? If it's "be informed" that's the same as saying "nothing" and why did you even bother?

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Lea Kissner @leak.bsky.social · 23/01/2026

I have no idea what this person wanted when they called my spouse, but if they ask me for more wipes I also do not know what to say.

Screenshot of a text message:
Phone rings. Answer. "And if she asks for more wipes, I don't know what to say. Oh. Hello. Hi, I'm looking for the Chief Information Officer of Lacework?"

Me: "I honestly don't know what to say. This is the wrong number for that."

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Lea Kissner @leak.bsky.social · 14/01/2026

A security vendor sent me a pile of paper with many statistics where [citation needed]. For instance.... Why does automating IAM reduce the likelihood of a breach to 5%? From what? And how is that independent from, say, use of passkeys or auto-escaping templates?

Purple gradient paper with yellow box, blue caution sign, and text "Breach Reduce likelihood of beach to 5% With automated IAM"

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Lea Kissner @leak.bsky.social · 12/01/2026

Progress in my ongoing effort to decorate the wall behind me with something other than stacks of books. 🧵 for the fun stuff The round thing is the Incident Hat/Bad News hat. I can't remember if I've told this story here, but basically I trained several companies to be scared of a hat instead of me

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Lea Kissner @leak.bsky.social · 07/01/2026

Folks in privacy engineering and related fields, it's PEPR time again -- submit talk proposals about topics related to designing, building, and understanding products and systems which foster privacy and respect. I'm looking forward to seeing your talks! www.usenix.org/conference/p...

usenix.org

PEPR '26

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Lea Kissner @leak.bsky.social · 04/01/2026

I know perfectly well there are bilingual people at Google, so what were they thinking by having YouTube automatically translate videos with no way to turn it off? Thank goodness they haven't managed to translate every language yet, so I can coherently watch at least some non-English videos

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Lea Kissner @leak.bsky.social · 01/01/2026

This is one of the nightmares of modern security. We need to know where every single one of those is, what we're trusting it to do and not do, and how to make it stop *immediately*. And every time someone wants to use a new one we need to figure out whether we can trust it as far as we can throw it

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Lea Kissner @leak.bsky.social · 26/12/2025

Bluesky buddies, I now have a 3D printer in my house, a relatively simple design little counter design I've had sketched out for several years, and a complete inability to 3D model. Does anyone know someone who could work with me to get this together? Happy to pay the going rate, whatever that is.

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Lea Kissner @leak.bsky.social · 21/12/2025

Prop 13 has had some wild effects on schools in California. Even back when I was in high school in Palo Alto, which is the well-off and education-focused town where Stanford is, they made the chemistry classes enter competitions so people would send us lab equipment.

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Reposted by Lea Kissner

Jonathan Friesen @jonnyfreeze.bsky.social · 05/12/2025

As a security person, I SO appreciate great bits like this open letter around bad security advice ( www.hacklore.org/letter), especially given that it's got reputable people like @leak.bsky.social signed on. I agree that outdated advice and half-truths are just as bad as giving wrong advice.

hacklore.org

The Letter — Stop Hacklore!

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Lea Kissner @leak.bsky.social · 25/11/2025

I considered adding a picture of my study but the piles of books are sprouting piles of books. And I just ordered some more books.

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Lea Kissner @leak.bsky.social · 24/11/2025

The comment thread here is the embodiment of :lolsob: There is legitimate promise to LLM-assisted coding, but there are also legitimate risks. Like this. And no one here is malicious!

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Reposted by Lea Kissner

Deirdre Connolly¹ ² @durumcrustulum.com · 22/11/2025

now everyone together quote @leak.bsky.social

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Lea Kissner @leak.bsky.social · 21/11/2025

The "Gear" series on the Articles of Interest podcast has convinced me that if for some reason I was in the armed forces (and I wasn't doing the obvious things for me to do) I would want to be in the quartermaster corps. The complexity in clothing alone 🤯 www.articlesofinterest.co/podcast

articlesofinterest.co

EPISODES | Articles Of Interest

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Lea Kissner @leak.bsky.social · 13/11/2025

If my emails ever get leaked, just know that I'm not sub-literate, I'm lazy.

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Lea Kissner @leak.bsky.social · 10/11/2025

A performance plan (PIP) is incredibly hard on everyone involved. The person going through it, the manager, and *the entire team*. When I'm running one, I deeply want to help the person going through it find whatever's missing so that they do an awesome job and we can keep working together. 1/🧵

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Lea Kissner @leak.bsky.social · 09/11/2025

Up until a few weeks ago, the conversation virtually always went like this: Them: "why are you wearing a mask?" Me: "because I don't want to accidentally kill my mom. Plus I hear COVID is no fun." Them: *vivid story of how terrible COVID is* It sounds less fun than wearing a mask, y'all 🤷

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Lea Kissner @leak.bsky.social · 07/11/2025

I hired a director recently and this was my screening question: can you please explain the difference between public-key and symmetric-key cryptography. Virtually all the candidates, who universally claimed security engineering expertise of some kind (some cryptography-related) could not. At all.

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Lea Kissner @leak.bsky.social · 06/11/2025

"Betteridge's law of headlines is an adage that states: "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no."" en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteri...

en.wikipedia.org

Betteridge's law of headlines - Wikipedia

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Lea Kissner @leak.bsky.social · 06/11/2025

"Worked for" is an exaggeration here -- while there may be actual staff in this group, these scan centers are mostly operated by victims of human trafficking. This is one of the many reasons we need stronger online security across the board: to break the incentives behind this horror.

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Lea Kissner @leak.bsky.social · 05/11/2025

Would you like to work on LinkedIn? InfoSec is hiring! We have both manager and IC roles -- and more coming. I'm here because I want to help protect people and not work with jerks. If that's what you like, then I hope you'll join us. Jobs in 🧵

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Lea Kissner @leak.bsky.social · 23/10/2025

Encryption without key rotation is just sparkling obfuscation

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Lea Kissner @leak.bsky.social · 22/10/2025

Not being a jerk is a shockingly underrated hiring strategy.

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Reposted by Lea Kissner

Naomi Alderman @naomialderman.bsky.social · 13/10/2025

pleasures of the flesh fade, other people however much you love each other will sometimes let you down, the world is filled with sorrows. but from today until the last day of your life, wherever you are if you pay attention there is something new to learn. it's a great comfort.

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