Keith is an architect by day, blogger by night. He’s responsible for all the content on this blog, and irresponsible for everything else.
Last Monday, I got a text message from my uncle saying his office computer was hacked, and he couldn’t access any of his files. Even without probing further, I already knew he’d been hit with ransomware and was now an unwitting victim in a criminal industry estimated to be worth Billions of dollars. After learning a bit more, I found out that the IT guys at the company backed up their...
On the 1st of February, Malaysians experienced yet another fuel price increase. Which was surprising because the price of oil and the ringgit conversion rate seemed to be favoring a drop. You see in Malaysia, the fuel prices are controlled and subsidized by the government, and it sets the price for petrol at the pump. In the past, fuel price changes were few and far between, but since 2007...
As Malaysia slowly (but surely) migrates to Chip and Pin, some banks have taken the opportunity to issue not just new Pin-enabled cards, but contactless-enabled ones as well. To be clear, Banks are only mandated to issue new Pin cards (replacing the signature cards you had before), but are taking the opportunity to also embed contactless capabilities into them as well. After all they’re...
The New York Times reported this week that Facebook has ‘quitely developed’ a censorship tool, specifically for the Chinese government to suppress content on their platform. The piece writes: “the social network quietly developed software to suppress posts from appearing in people’s news feeds in specific geographic areas, according to three current and former Facebook...
As with all new shiny equipment, a newly installed router in your home requires a few things to be configured to properly secure it. Goes without saying, that you should change your WiFi password the moment the technician leaves your home, but there are other things you’d need to configure in order to secure your router against common attacks. Now remember, even if you follow all the...
As a follow-up to my previous post on DDOS attacks [1,2], I’ve seen a lot of so-called ‘solutions’ to the problem, which really aren’t solutions at all. While it’s still not explicitly clear that the StarHub DDOS was executed by Mirai, a recently released malware built specifically for DDOS, the timing and similarity of it to other Mirai attacks leave little room for...
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...
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...
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...
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...