SCADA Security Breach

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SCADA, or Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition, security breaches are not often heard about. At least, not at the same level of other sorts of computer crimes. But SCADA has the potential to impact the physical environment, physical security, and personal safety of all of us, so such incidents should not be taken lightly. For those who are unfamiliar with SCADA, it’s basically about computer systems and networks that monitor and control industrial, infrastructure, or facility-based processes. For example, SCADA…

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ESET Endpoint Security Solutions

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Let me guess. You might have heard of ESET, but you’re not very familiar with their products? Well, you could be forgiven, because they’ve got just 2% share of Singapore installations and 9% share of the global installations. But they have promising products and look set to grow from strength to strength. I attended their blogger engagement event a couple of days ago. They were announcing their new flagship product ESET Endpoint Solutions for enterprise customers. They also shared the…

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Is the Facebook Mobile App Secure?

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At a security class yesterday, the trainer asked if we access Facebook with the Facebook App on our mobile phones. Most of us do. More importantly, do we use Wifi while doing so? As you know, Wifi traffic can be easily snooped, particularly on open Wifi networks such as Wireless@SG. If hackers can capture the traffic between your device and Facebook servers, they could easily obtain your Facebook session key and, subsequently, use it to hijack your Facebook session. There…

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What Do You Know About Safe Online Computing

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What do we really know about safe computing? I was reading an ISC2 blog post “Practice Safe Computing” recently, and it preached several practices that we should all adopt to use our computers safely. It’s something that the author teaches to children. I’m an adult, I’m an IT person, and IT security is one of the things I do. So, I’m surprised I didn’t arrive at the correct answer to his first question. “What is the first thing we should…

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HardwareZone Malware

It looks like Chrome has decided today that HardwareZone site contains malware, and presented me with this warning when I was trying to access the site. Details on the Google Safe Browsing Diagnostic page indicate that 3 pages were found to have caused malicious content to be downloaded and installed without user’s consent. I just wonder how many users will really heed the warning and avoid HardwareZone?

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PCs and Viruses

Sometimes, I think we’re doomed. Our IT, our cyberspace, they all belong to hackers. Hackers of the bad sort. The world is at their mercy. It’s one thing for the layman to be lost and give up in defeat. But it’s quite another thing for an IT professional to think of computer viruses as part and parcel of IT. Okay, I know, computer viruses are indeed rampant and everywhere. But if it is on your own computer, you don’t just…

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Security Cannot Be Slapped On

Many people are still not getting it. IT security has to be a fundamental component in any IT application. It’s not something you can easily slap on later. But still every so often, when I talk to “IT professionals” about various projects, IT security continues to be an afterthought. Most people are just concerned about rolling out features. Many people understand the importance of code modularity, code re-use, and many other nice principles of software engineering. But few actually think…

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Firefox the Most Vulnerable Browser

It seems quite surprising to me to learn about this. After all, didn’t Firefox try to market itself as the safer, more secure alternative to browse the web than Microsoft Internet Explorer? Furthermore, considering that hackers tend to focus their exploit efforts on the most popular web browser for maximum impact, and Microsoft Internet Explorer still takes top place in the browser market share, you wouldn’t expect Firefox to take the number one spot for being most vulnerable.

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Software Updates Week

There’re plenty of software updates this week. First up was for Snow Leopard which is updated to Mac OS X 10.6.2, which contains quite a number of fixes (58, apparently) including an important one that involves data loss. Then, the Safari web browser itself, whose updates are distributed separately from Mac OS X, was updated to version 4.0.4. It fixes some security vulnerabilities, and improves performance and stability. Finally, there is also the update to Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac…

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The Vision of Jackie Chan Fighting Virii

This was another guest lecture I attended this week. It’s the boss of the company who engaged Jackie Chan to fight virii for its TV commercial we’ve been seeing on our TV screens. Yes, Eugene Kaspersky. The title of his talk? Check it out in the photo on left. Eugene shared his vision for a secure Internet. He’s idealistic. But I suppose visions can be idealistic. Unfortunately, the steps to achieve that vision were also unrealistic. But then again, I…

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