Hi, My Name is Bernie

 Twelve days into 2023, there had already been three major outages on three international airports. The first one was the outage at the Ninoy Aquino International Airport (NAIA) and it affected air traffic in the whole country, stranding thousands of passengers. Days after, there was similar outage in the US that also affected flights nationwide also stranding thousands of passengers. Then the same thing happened in Canada ! The first time it happened, I can accept that it is an isolated case however simplistic the explanation was.  But three in a row? I think something more serious is happening here.  I hope I'm wrong BUT this is by far quite alarming and my "spider sense" is tingling!  I hope I am wrong here though. I will closely follow this and write about what I discover.

During this difficult time of "enhanced community quarantine", one of the things I do is muck around my gadgets to play games, research. and yes, blog.  During one of those gaming sessions on my phone, I noticed a simple and unobtrusive ad for a VPN.  The ad was about Tachyon VPN .  My initial reaction is that of indifference because ads for VPN service is a dime a dozen, especially when playing games on either iOS or Android.  A lot of them doesn't even work at all. However, I was strangely compelled to click on the ad and I was redirected to the App store amd since I was already there, I threw caution to the wind and clicked on install, ready to immediately delete the app once my device flags it as suspicious or malicious. I was pleasantly surprised when I was greeted by a rather clean interface and since no alarm bells rang, I decided to try it out and connect.  Upon connection, I was checked if the VPN was working.  I did this by going to https://www.wh...

In my previous post, I discussed Online Anonymity, its importance and how it is different from Online Privacy. Now that the importance of Online Anonymity has been highlighted, the question my five readers have in mind now is "how do we maintain our Online Anonymity?" First things first: in order to use the internet with Online Privacy in mind will require a paradigm shift -- in order to surf the net anonymously, we must try to relearn some of the things we are used to doing when accessing the internet in the convectional way.  Here are some things that we are all used to doing but should not practice if we want to access the internet Anonymously: use an anonymizing browser such as TOR Brower . when searching for information or anything else, do not use Google, Bing or Yahoo.  These search engines keeps a record of all searches, including which users did the search. never log in to any of your usual social media sites.  Once logged in, these social media sites wi...

Yesterday, I discussed two most successful and most prevalent social engineering tactics used nowadays. One emerging tactic that may not be as widespread but just as damaging is VISHING.  What is VISHING? According to wikipedia, VISHING is a form of criminal phone fraud, using social engineering over the telephone system to gain access to private personal and financial information for the purpose of financial gains. How does it work? Unsuspecting victims will receive a phone call from someone claiming to work for their bank.  The caller will claim that the victim's credit/debit or ATM card needs to be verified to prevent it from being deactivated.  The caller will then ask for the victim's personal information for "verification".  The caller will also ask for the card's CVV/CVC number (it is the three-digit number at the back of the card). To make the conversation appear legitimate, other questions may be asked but all the fraudster actually need from the ...

In my last article, I discussed how wonderful it is to live in a time when technology gives us an unprecedented access to information and services right at the comfort of our homes and even at the palm of our hands. I also discussed how most of this technology becomes accessible to almost everyone. It is no longer a novelty seeing a sidewalk vendor playing mobile games on a smartphone or a security guard watching a videostream of his favorite NBA team. Teenagers often share their OOTDs, foodography and other activities on social media. Busy people often do their banking using the mobile banking application on their cellphones. Free wifi on malls and other public places are a godsend for people who do not have data plans on their mobile devices because it allows them to do all these at virtually no cost at all. As mundane as those activity may appear, each one of them poses a risk to both the users and the device that is in use.  I will enumerate the risks that a person opens ...

We live in such wonderful times.  More and more people are exposed to technology that, years ago, were too expensive a few years ago.  Information is now available to a lot more people thanks to the high adoption rate of smartphones, tablets and laptops.  Students never had it so good because I still remember having to commute to different libraries in order to write research papers. People who need to do banking can do a lot of financial transactions simply by downloading and using the mobile banking applications of their respective banks.  Mobile payment platforms are slowly replacing the need to carry cash in order to pay for their groceries, medicines, monthly bills etc. However, with all these conveniences, comes danger.  Hackers and fraudsters are taking advantage of this to take advantage of people who are not-too-savvy with technology to steal information and even money.  Text messages purporting to come from government agencies, dubious ...