As the 1MDB fiasco begins to simmer over the political stove, I wanted to inject some technical information into this discussion, specifically around emails and how they’re almost useless pieces of evidence.

Just to make sure everyone’s on the same page, here’s some context.

In early March 2015, sarawakreport.org, a website run by investigative journalist Clare Rewcastle-Brown together with the London Sunday Times, published an article on controversial deal done by the 1MDB fund. At the centre of the deal was a man named Jho Low, who masterminded a sophisticated ‘wheeler-dealer’ that pocketed him $700 Million, all of which (at least according to sarawakreport.org) was siphoned from 1MDB, a Malaysian sovereign wealth fund.

Honestly, I don’t understand the financially complex deals that sarawakreport.org was trying to explain to lil ol’ me. So I’m just going to take her word here, that all the documentation that was produced leads to the conclusion that Jho Low masterminded the “Heist of the Century” by stealing $700 million through shady back door deals involving 1MDB and a company called PetroSaudi. But then of course, the question becomes, can you trust the documentation.

Reading the article you get the sense that the e-mail trail presented forms the backbone of the entire story, and if the emails themselves are not true then the entire story is untrue as well.

In either case though, let’s get straight to the point, and say that e-mails by themselves are quite useless.

I've stopped scrapping the API readings for Malaysia, as the MET department have stopped publishing historical readings on their website.

The data has been updated to include all API readings up to 01-Sept-2015, and then from 28-Sep-2015 to 03-Oct-2015. The ‘gap’ in the dataset is because the MET department changed their webpage and removed the legacy data before I could get my hands on them. I’ve written to them for it, hopefully we get a useful response. For now though, there’s 24 months of data from Aug-2013 to Oct-2015 in the dataset. enjoy!

To get all the readings by region in a single delimited file, click this link, I apologize for the messiness of the data and the files, I should tidy them up by the end of the month. Contact me directly for anything specific.

Keith

Once again, your friendly neighbourhood techie has used this powers for the good of the country.

Last September, I scrapped all the procurement data from the Malaysian’s Government MyProcurement website, this time I scrapped all the Air Pollutant Index (API) readings from the Department of Environment (DOE) website.

First off, Kudos to the DOE for keeping such great tabs on the data–overall the DOE publishes one API reading for every hour or every day across 52 locations in Malaysians. Just to put the sheer volume of data into perspective, for just one year that’s:

52 locations x 1 reading/hour x 24 hours/day x 365 days/year  = 455,520 readings.

Late in January the Malaysian Airlines website was ‘supposedly’ hacked by Lizard Squad. You  might remember Lizard Squad as the guys who ‘hacked’ the XBox and Play Station network over the Christmas holidays, and I’m using a lot of ‘quotes’ here because Lizard Squad didn’t really ‘hack’ XBox One or Playstation, they merely DDOS-ed the services.

What is DDOS-ed I hear you say?

Essentially you’ve denied McDonalds their chance to serve their customers–or you’ve just launched a Denial of Service (DOS) attack–the extra D in DDOS, just stands for distributed.

Real-Life DDOS happen all the time–what do you think the Thai Protestors were doing to Airports in 2008?

But why is this important?

The REAL motive of the Lizard Squad DOS attack became apparent some days later when they started to offer their DDOS attack as a service to paying customers. Essentially you could go online and buy their services to attack a target–maybe a competitor company, a personal blog of someone you don’t like, or just about anything. Lizard Squad were hawking their services to anyone with cash.

Some suspected that Lizard Squad were running this large DDOS attack using nothing more than home routers–similar to the ones that UniFi provides and that I demonstrated could be hacked trivially over an internet connection.

I want to inform you that UnoTelly will allow people stream the NFL Super Bowl for free on Sunday, February 1, regardless of where they live or whether they are UnoTelly subscribers.

We are offering free access to media stations (NBC Sports, Channel 4 and more) that will be broadcasting the Super Bowl for free. Visitors will not be required to sign up for a subscription, but simply need to submit their e-mail address. Please feel free to visit our Super Bowl page for more information:https://www2.unotelly.com/superbowl

 Step 1: Logon to your router

To logon to your router, fire up your web-browser (Chrome, Firefox, Safari–even Internet Explorer will do).  In the address bar where you usually type www.google.com type http://192.168.0.1 (sometimes it’s http://192.168.1.1 ) or just click the link. Once there enter the username and password of the router. If you’re uncertain try any one of the following combinations:

As we come to terms with the terrible events that occurred at the offices of Charlie Hebdo, I think we need to be cognizant of  what these attacks really mean, and how our response to these events (even in far away Malaysia) has severe repercussions on our future.

As a Blogger and Techie, I’m 100% for absolute ’no holds-barred’ Freedom of expression.. I’ve written so much on the subject it begins to bore people, but we have so little freedom of expression in this country, we must fight to preserve what we have, and rise up to pursue even more.

Yesterday I Googled something about maxis that took me to a forum.maxis.com.my link. Unfortunately, Firefox wasn’t happy with Maxis, because I got the following screen:

Firefox is the first of the mainstream browsers to end support of SSLv3, ever since Poodle was published. For those of you who aren’t keeping tabs of security issues–Poodle was a big vulnerability discovered in the 2nd half of 2014, that affected the SSLv3 protocol.

A couple of days back, I was at my in-laws doing some browsing on their PC. Now my in-laws have a Windows XP laptop, that isn’t secured, which is fine because as far as I can tell, I’m the only one that uses it. Most of them now go to their phones or tablets for internet access–nobody uses PCs anymore!!

Environment News Service, an environmental focused news website this week accused Malaysian government hackers of attacking it after it ran a story implicating Sarawak governor Tun Abdul Taib Mahmud of corruption and graft. As a result, the site was down for 2-hours, before the site manage to re-gain control.

“The attack on our site came from a Malaysian government entity as identified by their IP address,” Sunny Lewis, editor-in-chief of Environment News Service (ENS)

But what exactly is an IP address, and how did ENS identify it?

Let me explain.

Recently I received a phishing email from konzie2@usm.edu telling me that Maybank had installed new security features and that I need to validate my details on the Maybank2u web portal. The email was marked as SPAM by Gmail, and trying to visit the site further sparked more warnings from Firefox AND my anti-virus.

But I was curious as to what the link would entail, in much the same way I was curious about the RHB phishing emails I received some months back.

Hopefully this post gives you an indication of just how sophisticated these attacks are, and manages to educate you on the one true way to establish if the site you’re visiting is genuine.

The fake login page for Maybank2u looks exactly like the REAL login page of Maybank2u, there really is no difference from the victims perspective. What’s more interesting is when you go deeper, by just enter in ‘a’ username and a password you get to the following page (please don’t enter ‘your’ username and password, just ‘a’ username and password)