CategorySecurity & Privacy

Security and Privacy topics

Hack TM Unifi: In case you’ve lost your default password

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There’s a lot of documentation online on how to hack your neighbours Wi-Fi, but sometimes you need to hack your own system. Usually its because you’ve change your router password and forgot it completely, leaving you in the cold desolate place we like to call “No router land”. Don’t fear though, its actually pretty darn easy to hack your standard Dlink Dir...

The Security Offences Bill 2012 -Technology Perspective

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The Security Offences (Special Measures) Act 2012 and it’s new amendment. that wonderful piece of legislation meant to repeal the archaic and ‘draconian’ ISA may turn out to be even more archaic and draconian than the ISA it was meant to replace. While much of the legal fanfare has been focusing on the detention without trial sections of the bill, as a tech blogger, I wanted to...

How Computer Security Research works: Facebook 20,000 prize

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[box icon=”chat”]In the early days of public computing, researchers who discovered vulnerabilities would quietly tell the product vendors so as to not also alert hackers. But all too often, the vendors would ignore the researchers. Because the vulnerability was not public, there was no urgency to fix it. Fixes might go into the next product release. Researchers, tired of this, started...

.my domains hacked: Why SSL is more important than ever

MyNic is the organization responsible for managing the .my Top Level Domain, which means every website address that ends with a .my is under their administration. These centralized control centers act as giant targets for hackers, but for the most part, they’re protected better than Fort Knox–or they should be. Yesterday, a hacker going by the name Tiger-M@te successfully manage to...

Should the government use Microsoft products?

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[box icon=”chat”] I don’t think the US government should use operating systems made in China for the same reason that most governments shouldn’t use operating systems made in the US and in fact we just got proof since Microsoft is now known to be telling the NSA about bugs in Windows before it fixes them. -Richard Matthew Stallman founder of Free Software Foundation (Techbytes...

Part 3: PRISM and Upstream

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Initially I wrote about PRISM and how a lot of people felt it was a tool to intercept communication in flight to companies like Google and Facebook, however slightly more details have emerged to debunk that claim. However, it’s of paramount importance that we understand what people are saying. No one is denying that communications aren’t being intercepted on their way to Google...

PRISM and Tempora

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As Edward Snowden begins to look for more ‘accommodating’ countries who wouldn’t mind playing host to a man that currently is more wanted than Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein and Kim Kardashian combined, more details slowly begin to emerge about PRISM, painting an ever clearer picture of the extent of the program both Stateside and abroad. Each individual piece of information...

How secure are the webpages of Malaysian Banks and Telco

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I’ve almost been fascinated by the fact, that our money in the bank these days are secured not by steel doors or armed guards, but rather by cryptography and the encryption keys that enable them. To put it in the simplest form  your money in the bank is protected by a number–that’s what an encryption key essentially is. A long binary number of 1’s and 0’s that...

What is PRISM?

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There’s a controversy brewing in the land of the free, one that will have implications for Americans, but also Malaysians and nearly every citizen of the world. We may look back at the moment Mr. Snowden leaked controversial (and ugly) slides about a program called ‘PRISM’ as the start of a pivotal moment in internet history, a moment where we either begun a massive campaign to...

Security Offences Bill vs. Universal declaration of Human Rights

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This is what Article 12 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights says: No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks. This is what security offences bill in Malaysia says: (1) Notwithstanding any other...