2025-10-30 –, Main Hall
The tech we all take for granted can be weaponised in surprising ways to cause real harm to real people. In recent years we’ve seen a disturbing increase in popular platforms and smart devices being exploited to harass, surveil and threaten already vulnerable people, because these products aren’t built with their safety in mind. It’s not that developers don’t care about their users, it’s just that most of us would never imagine our products being misused in these ways. This talk explores how we can design and test for these unimaginable threats, so that we can all make technology safer for everyone.
Threat modelling is a fantastic tool for discovering how a product might be exploited, but it’s limited by our ability to imagine the kinds of harm that people want to do. So while we’re making our apps impervious to hostile nation states and sophisticated cybercrime stunt-hacks we might be leaving some users open to familial abuse or targeted harassment. This talk introduces some achievable, practical strategies to expand our understanding and enhance our threat modelling practices so that we’re better equipped to protect people from the harms they might face.
This talk will discuss some of the ways that technology has been abused to harm marginalised and vulnerable communities. It’s a heavy topic, but important to understand the kinds of threats we need to consider – especially because many of these threats aren’t obvious to those of us who haven’t experienced them.
Petra is a security specialist on a mission to make good information security accessible to everyone. She has a point and she’s getting to it.