ArchiveOctober 2016

How the StarHub DDOS (possibly) happened

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Customers of Singaporean ISP StarHub, suffered two major disruptions to their service over the past week, in what the telco said was a result of a “intentional and likely malicious distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks”. Oh the humanity!! In what appears to be a copycat of the Dyn attack we saw (at roughly the same time), the attack signals the first local salvo in the war of...

Internet of shitty things!

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Brian Krebs is the most reputable name in CyberSecurity reporting, his krebsonsecurity website is the best source of ‘real’ journalism on the subject. But reputation works both ways, the same thing that makes him popular in some circles, makes him unpopular in other. He’s had criminal hackers send him heroin in the mail and even have SWAT teams descend on his home with guns all...

Hotline Jais is a terrible idea!

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Jais recently launched anew mobile app to allow the public to easily report any crimes that contravene syariah laws. Obviously there’s social and legal implications here, which I won’t go into, but we need to understand just how stupid this idea is. When you ask amateurs to give you security, what you eventually end up with is amateur security. It’s the reason why Maths...

All you eggs in one basket

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Is it wise to use an online password manager? After all, putting your passwords on the cloud seems like a really dumb idea. But I use password manager because while storing stuff on the cloud may present risk, it’s far riskier and dumber to re-use passwords. Why you need a password manager? Despite the sexiness of zero-day exploits and hardcore state-sponsored hacking groups we see on the...