Hi, My Name is Bernie

A few days ago, many people woke up to find unauthorized transactions in their GCash mobile wallets. These transactions, which occurred at a rate of Php 2,000 per transaction, even affected a local actress, drawing widespread attention. While the technical cause of these unauthorized transactions remains a mystery, I believe it’s crucial to address the underlying issue: GCash, and other mobile wallet applications in general, are essentially digital versions of physical wallets. Storing money in wallets, whether virtual or physical, inherently carries risks, with theft being the most significant concern. Physical wallets have been the target of various theft methods, and this raises the question: why do individuals, regardless of whether they use digital or physical wallets, keep a substantial amount of money in their wallets? Wouldn’t it be safer to deposit these funds in a bank or keep them securely at home? While this doesn’t absolve GCash of responsibility, it’s important to recogni...

  I am uncertain how to respond to this news report. Schneider Electric recently experienced a cyberattack and the hacking group known as Greppy has issued a demand for $125,000 worth of baguettes. Failure to meet this demand will result in the release of the 40 GB of data allegedly exfiltrated by the group. If the report is accurate, this constitutes an unprecedented occurrence, rendering my initial intention to rename this blog as The Hungry Hacker unfeasible Read the report here:  Hackers demand France’s Schneider Electric pay a $125k ransom in baguettes | Tom's Hardware

  Hot on the the heels of the string of controversies hounding Twitter after the Musk Takeover, this happens.  So what happens next?  I did an immediate change of password and enabled multi-factor authentication. So if you are on Twitter, please change your password immediately even if you haven't receive any similar notice and do yourself a favor, please enable multi-factor authentication too.  This is for your own good :D

Fun fact: Not all malicious "Hacking" incidents involves actual hacking actiities.  In fact, a large perceentage of so-called "hacking" victims in fact does not involve any computer hacking whatsoever. Before I continue, let me first define what hacking really is. Hacking is a series of activities including surveying target systems and identifying and exploiting any vulnerabilites identified on the target system.  Sounds rather exciting but actual hacking activities invloves a lot of patience and a little bit of luck to be successful.  Depending on the implemented security of the system that is targetted for a hack, the activity will take at least a few hours up to a couple of days even weeks!  Imagine taking weeks in order to compromise accounts. That being said, we can safely say that hacking is not an easy thing to pull off in order to be "profitable". The easier way to steal enough information to compromise accounts.  This is where "Social Eng...