Net Safety PH

Let's say that one day you needed to hire a househelp. You go through the process of having that person apply for legal documentation and clearances. The person dutifully submits them in due time and come interview period, the person passed the rigorous entry process you setup. You offered and actually agreed in contract the roles the person have to do for a compensation. Then what? Do you give the person all the keys to the doors in your house?

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...

To the truly paranoid, the only way to protect your data against being siphoned or collected by anyone is not to have your data posted online at all. Unfortunately, it feels and looks impossible in this day and age. People have an unfounded fear of missing out on what is going on online. As such, the next best thing we can do is be constantly made aware of best practices for each social media (SocMed) platform on how to minimize possible data collection from parties you do not want to have anything to do with. Data analysis on the other hand is impossible for the specific platform you are on. Why? because most platforms explicitly indicated in their Terms of Use that they can and will do so, once you sign up and use their platform. That said, let's tackle Facebook and the next best thing everyone can do while they are using it.

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...

Imagine trying to remember 10 to 50 passwords or access credentials just to get access to things you need to work done. People do not really care less about cybersecurity. The problem is that oftentimes security implementations makes the system less usable for people. That is one of the reasons why it seems that people care less about cybersecurity. People don't really care less about cybersecurity, they are simply overwhelmed with the amount of decisions that they have to make to access their own data. People experience what is called 'decision fatigue'. It turns out, this is a known phenomenon in Psychology. This is exactly what people are experiencing and a research paper calls it 'security fatigue'

Do you ever wonder what Social Media (SocMed) companies get out of letting you use functionality of a system that is continually being worked-on and improved upon by employing paid professionals? Do you want to know the answer? If the service is free and is not selling you any product, then their product is most likely you or your data. Yes, it's that simple. We encourage you to take some time to review Facebook's Terms of Service in the screenshot on the right and on their page - https://www.facebook.com/terms.php

Cloud has been the buzz for several couple of years now. Cloud server, distributed networking, automatic redundancy, and all the other stuff promoted with the adoption of "Cloud." But there really is no cloud. To us, it's just a marketing lingo. The underlying technologies used to implement "cloud" has been there for a long time, they are system administrator and network engineer domain technologies. To us, the cloud is just another rack of servers managed by someone else. To us, it's just somebody else's computer.

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.

You've probably already read us saying we prefer browsers over custom apps. And there's a really good reason for it. And today we'll dive into one those reason. Less than twelve hours of the time that this post is written, waves of articles online warned users that there is a widespread Phishing scam targeting Gmail users. The reality is that it's not only Gmail that is subject to this attack. All emails are. But for the time being, we'll use Gmail as a sample to illustrate a core problem. Yes, you may have guessed it already. People's mindset, misunderstanding technology and its wrong use.

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.

What exactly is Flash and why do I need to uninstall it? Flash has in the past years provided a lot of visual treat that wasn't entirely possible with other web tools or technology. For web developers back then using Flash also meant that they are at the top of their game. Unfortunately, as its use and adoption became very common, it also meant that it's a very good attack surface for malicious software or malware. Indeed it was and still is since it also became web page's video player of choice. It became so because it was a commonly installed plugin in most computers and the competing technologies weren't able to match its ubiquity or "common-ness."

There is more than enough resource and personal experience why most of us whose work revolves around having internet access can conclude that the internet is not safe. Why then is there a need for a separate Internet Safety advocacy network specifically tailored to the Philippine market? Well, the answer is both simple and complicated.

Only a few people will really believe warnings such as the one we're about to quote. It goes like this:

There are many Threats to Internet Safety for Filipinos and our government have long started passing laws that would enable us to counter the effects, prevent it from happening, and be made aware of its consequence. Let's start by understanding the official and legal definitions of these threats. Among them are: Cyberbullying, Online Scam, Online Libel, Identity Theft, and Photo & Video Voyeurism