In a past life there was a PCWorld print magazine, and I wrote a monthly column for it.
The column was called “Privacy Watch” and it was all about tools and tips you could use to safeguard your PC against hackers and snoops. Every month I’d do my best to help readers with everything from building stronger passwords (or just adopting a good password manager) to securing their Wi-Fi network, and I had a blast doing it.
I mention all this just so you understand that while I’m no infosec expert, I’ve been covering and writing about digital privacy and security for awhile now. Even so, I had no clue that a few emoji could be the key to making my Wi-Fi networks basically unhackable by anyone but the most cutting-edge bad guys.
But that’s what I learned this week on The Full Nerd, thanks to recurring guest (and accomplished ethical hacker) Mike Danseglio (CEH & CISSP).
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Mike has kindly agreed to join us a few times to talk PCs and security in the past, whether it was running down some of the worst ways to troubleshoot a PC last year (he also worked in tech support at Microsoft in the ’90s) or arguing the merits of using guest networks to safeguard your home Wi-Fi with our own resident security maven (and Safe Mode newsletter author) Alaina Yee. But this week, he dropped a banger of a Wi-Fi security tip that blew my mind in its simplicity.
See, according to Mike, all modern methods of hacking Wi-Fi networks aren’t set up to recognize or use the emoji character set. So if you toss a few of your favorites into your Wi-Fi network name and password, odds seem extremely good that you just made it uncrackable—at least, until some bad guy figures this out and starts to build emoji support into password crackers.
“You can use emoji in access point names and passwords,” said Danseglio. “Putting an emoji in your access point name and your password breaks all of the current tools that are available to hack Wi-Fi.”
Of course, that assumes that every device you’re planning to connect to your network is able to read modern emoji and input them as well. If you have older hardware or devices with limited inputs (like some e-readers and printers, for example), putting a few 🍑 🤨 🚗 in your Wi-Fi network credentials could play havoc with your setup.
But even if you can’t make practical use of this information, just understanding the ways in which programs work (or don’t work) on your PC can teach you so much about the inner workings of these tools and systems that we trust with so much of our lives. It’s one of the things I’ve always loved about getting into the hobby of building, modifying, and upgrading PCs: You end up learning a ton about the tech that basically runs the modern world around us, and that goes a long way towards making that world seem less alien and scary when things don’t work the way they should.
When infosec expert Mike Danseglio stopped by the show this week to chat with regular cohosts Adam Patrick Murray and Alaina Yee, he didn’t just focus on Wi-Fi security. They got into a wide-ranging discussion that touched on everything from kernel-level anti-cheat systems in games to what cool hacks came out of DEFCON 2026 this year.
And of course, they wrapped up by taking some of your questions from the chat and our TFN Discord!
As much as I wish I could tell you that the biggest news of the week is prices dropping on memory and storage, the sad truth is we’re nowhere near there yet. But there’s still some cool stuff happening in the world of tech, as well as some wild stories about new humanoid robots and hidden scripts that are being used to create a unique fingerprint of your PC using silent audio.
This newsletter is dedicated to the memory of Gordon Mah Ung, founder and host of The Full Nerd, and executive editor of hardware at PCWorld.
