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...
When I was in school, we joked about people who kept their money under the mattress, that somehow those who didn’t use banks were less intelligent than people who did.The general thinking was that smart people kept their money in the bank, where it was safe from theft, fire and flood, while still collecting interest. In the 80’s this was a compelling argument, when interest rates were...
Some interesting points: Non-nation state actors now pose a significant threat to nation states Historical threats usually associated with bad nation states, can now be executed by non nation-states Industrial Era, was about a consolidation of power, in the past only the Government could run something as complex as a phone network In a Post-Industrial Era, it’s about the decentralization or...
This week, I’ll put the final touches on my move from Malaysia to Singapore. So, I felt it would a good idea to read through some Singaporean tech articles to see how tech events played out on the little red dot, and offer some unsolicited and completely useless advice on them. It wasn’t easy shifting through a boat-load of gadget reviews masquerading as tech journalism (I guess some...
You’ve probably heard of the hackers who almost got away with $1 billion, only to be thwarted by a typo. (if it weren’t for those meddling keyboards!) What you probably didn’t hear was that they had already wired $100 million to themselves, are assumed to have pocketed anywhere from $21 million to $81 million in cold hard cash. Sure, Billions is more than millions, but one a...
*A republication of my article on 2600, a hacker magazine* Greetings from Malaysia. This is my first time writing to 2600, although I’ve been a kindle subscriber for more than 2 years now. For my first article, I hoped to write about a little hacking expedition I embarked on a couple of months back to help me improve my coding skills as well as help me learn more about local internet users...