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Showing posts from April, 2017

Internet of Things is Unsafe.

We never liked the thought of having smart things. It's uncomfortable to think that something that one could carry on a palm could accomplish something far better than us humans could. Sadly, there are things that we created that could outperform our limited physical and weary souls. Yes, we acknowledge limitations because that is also the very foundation of what we are trying to achieve at Net Safety PH. There's only so much we can do to help inform people on how to better protect themselves against the dangers an increasingly connected world. We talked about things that we created or designed to outperform us, but it doesn't really start out that way. At first, it's simply to make our lives easier. Sometimes, it also starts out as some personal automation for a personal problem but all of a sudden gets applied to everybody else's somewhat related problem. Most of them are fantastic features that makes it our daily lives. Instead of visiting a friend's home

Human Element of Cybersecurity - A Hard Case

By no means the articles in this site have tackled or discussed deeper or technical aspects of cybersecurity simply because it is not its primary purpose. As you can read in our side panel, our purpose and goal for this is: Dedicated to providing Filipinos general information about online & offline security practices and how to better protect their data & privacy. As you can clearly read, we simply aimed at providing general information to the public, specifically our fellow Filipinos. In short, our goal was to partly address the human element of cybersecurity or information security. We approached this by deliberately/consciously NOT using technical terms in our writing, avoiding lingo specific to a work culture, and keeping it generally understandable. There's an old hyped web app in social media, Facebook in this instance, happening here in PH that once again gained attention among the general public. It's the type of web app that with a person's selfie/portra

Selfies and Vanity - Social Engineering Data Collection - Prefetching Biometric Data

How many of you would like to know what your age is according to a computer? How many of you would like to know who your celebrity look-a-like is? Did you try one of those web app? How about the mobile app? Wow! you look like that actor?! Congratulations! Wait, we have ten other friends who look like that actor? What a boring world if thousands of you actually look-a-alike one famous actor! Seriously though, it is just sad how guillible people are. It didn't even actually try to properly score similarity factor. It is sad that people just gave some other people one of the most identifiable factor about them. And the most common excuse, it is just harmless fun. Fun, Vanity - among the many of our frailties that threat actors (hackers, scammers) can exploit or use against us. Yes, our search for fun and validation can be easily used against us. Biometric authentication is gaining ground in everyday use. The commonplace fingerprint authentication is ... well, commonplace. It's n

What is HTTPS, Encryption, and Cipher?

By now you may have heard that a secure website starts with HTTPS and not just HTTP. And you have been making sure the site is secure when you access certain resources or post sensitive data. That is well and good but there seems to be a misconception that secure automatically means legitimate or authenticate site. It is not. Just because a website uses HTTPS doesn't automatically make it the authentic and legitimate site. So what is the difference? To understand the difference let us first make sure HTTPS is understood in its basic meaning.

Vulnerability Alert - Smart TV - Spy On You

If you are one of those Smart TV owners, you may have heard already that someone can hack your TV and use it to spy on you. Haven't heard of it before?! Now you have and the only redeeming thing about the previous hack is that it required hackers physical access to your Smart TV. That poses an entirely different problem together.