CategoryKeith’s Favorite Post

A collection of my favorite post in no particular order

SayaKenaHack.com

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On the 19th of October, Lowyat.net reported that a user was selling the personal data of MILLIONS of Malaysians on their forum. Shortly after, the article was taken down on the request of the MCMC, only to put up again, a couple of days later. Lowyat later reported that a total of 46.2 Million phone numbers were exposed,  and the data included IC numbers, Addresses, IMSI, IMEI and SIM numbers as...

Writing a WordPress Restoration script

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WordPress sites get hacked all the time, because the typical WordPress blogger install 100’s of shitty plugins and rarely updates their site. On the one hand, it’s great that WordPress has empowered so many people to begin blogging without requiring the ‘hard’ technical skills, on the other it just gives criminals a large number of potential victims. Two years ago, when I...

Relax dear-citizen your contactless card is relatively safe—ish

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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 safest place for your money is under the mattress

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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...

Two years on, teaching coding in schools declared a success

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KLANG: Two years on, the the pilot initiative to teach coding and digital security as an SPM subject has been touted as a resounding success, and the government is mulling a move to make it compulsory by 2020. The announcement shocked parents, as out of 10,000 students who took part in the pilot program, only 10 had scored an A while the rest had failed with a grade of F. Education Minister...

Show notes for today

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Your browser does not support native audio, but you can download this MP3 to listen on your device.   Some interesting links you might want to check out during my interview on BFM today, will tidy up this list later in the week. Office of Personnel Management Data Breach (Chinese hackers breaking into US Federal Employee Databases) China arrested the hackers responsible for OPM breach Turkey...

The Internet is slow because of illegal downloads

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Let’s start with the quote that set off the rage in my heart— “You can see today that our Internet is slow. Not because it itself is slow but because a lot of people are using it,” he said The government agency chief blamed this on illegal downloads hogging Internet bandwidth here, adding that this does not happen in countries like Germany due to stricter enforcement. “In Germany, the...

When bad advice comes from good people

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What happens when a government agency tasked with providing cybersecurity “guidance” and “expertise” gives you advice like “avoid uploading pictures of yourself to avoid the threat of black magic”? And then goes into damage-control claiming that it “was just a casual remark and did not represent the federal agency’s official position on the matter”,  only to...

The miners dilemma – Bitcoin sabotage can be profitable

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Imagine a small village of a 100 people. One day,  a sorcerer shows up,  and grants all the villagers magical 1000-sided dice, which are purely random and can only be thrown at a fixed rate of 1 throw per second (no faster & no slower). Over the next year, at noon of every day, the sorcerer will announce a random number between 1 and 1000, and the first villager to throw that number on their...

Apple vs. FBI: Everything you need to know

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A judge in the US has ordered Apple to provide ‘technical assistance’ to FBI, in creating what some (but not all) cybersecurity experts call a backdoor. In the few years I’ve written about these issues, I’ve never seen anything as hotly debated as this one, across the folks from digital security to foreign policy all coming down on both sides of the debate. On one hand it...