If you’ve come here from a link on twitter — you’d see that the address bar still says login.astro.com.my, but the site is rendering this page from my blog. If not, click this link to see what I mean. You’ll get something like this: Somehow I’ve managed to serve content from my site on an astro domain. Rest assured, I haven’t ‘hacked’ astro servers...
The Astro Data Breach
I previously wrote about how data breaches are like diamonds: They’re not as rare as you think They’re worth far more to you than to a thief They last forever And the recent debacle over the Astro data breach epitomizes all of these characteristics. First off, Lowyat has already reported 3 big data breaches (at least by my count), and rest assured these won’t be the last. Data...
Here’s one thing that’s already changed post GE14
In 2015, I was invited to a variety program on Astro to talk about cybersecurity. This was just after Malaysian Airlines (MAS) had their DNS hijacked, but I was specifically told by the producer that I could NOT talk about the MAS hack, because MAS was a government linked company, and they couldn’t talk bad about GLCs. Then half-way through the interview they asked me about government...
Gov TLS Audit has a website!
Gov TLS Audit finally has a website to complement the API. I used the services of a guy from fiverr to code the site, it isn’t the best design in the world, but it’s good enough for now. The site allows you to query a site and view the historical details of a particular .gov.my website. The full list of .gov hostnames can be found here. It also links to the full daily scan outputs (in...
First I deleted my most popular tweet — then I deleted 2000 more.
Two weeks ago, I rage-tweeted something regarding Malaysian politics that got a lot more viral than I liked (I’ve censored out the profanity for various reasons, most notably, there are teenagers who read this blog). It was a pointless collection of 200 characters, that somehow resonated with people enough to be shared across social media. Obviously, since it was me, the tweet was filled...
Gov TLS Audit : Architecture
Last Month, I embarked on a new project called GovTLS Audit, a simple(ish) program that would scan 1000+ government websites to check for their TLS implementation. The code would go through a list of hostnames, and scan each host for TLS implementation details like redirection properties, certificate details, http headers, even stiching together Shodan results into a single comprehensive data...
Read this before GE14
Let’s start this post the same way I start my day — by looking at Facebook. Facebook made $40 Billion dollars in revenue in 2017, solely from advertising to pure schmucks like you. The mantra among the more technically literate is that facebook doesn’t have users it has products that it sells to advertisers, it just so happens that all its products are homo-sapien smart-phone...
Why we need centralized breach notification
Let’s start with the basics. Data Breaches are common — and will continue to be the norm. How the App Economy and Big Data ruined it As we shifted towards the ‘App-Economy’ and ‘Big-Data’ (circa 3 years ago), consumers begun sharing more data with more apps. Everyone and their granny, wanted to create a new app, and everyone was told to collect as much data as...
Gov.My TLS audit: Version 2.0
Last week I launched a draft of the Gov.my Audit, and this week we have version 2.0 Here’s what changed: Added More Sites. We now scan a total of 1324 government websites, up from just 1180. Added Shodan Results. Results includes both the open ports and time of the Shodan scan (scary shit!) Added Site Title. Results now include the HTML title to give a better description of the site...
I scanned 1000 government sites, what I found will NOT shock you
Previously, I moaned about dermaorgan.gov.my, a site that was probably hacked but was still running without basic TLS. This is unacceptable, that in 2018, we have government run websites, that ask for personal information, running without TLS. So I decided to check just how many .gov.my sites actually implemented TLS, and how many would start being labled ‘not secure’ by Google in...