Hi, My Name is Bernie

In a world ravaged by COVID-19, the reliance on the internet has been magnified. Majority of the workforce who can perform their mundane office tasks remotely are now allowed to work from home. Schools are virtually ghost towns as most of them opt to conduct classes online. Banking and other financial transactions are also mostly done from home. This unexpected "digital transformation" is well and good as it encouraged work from home and distance learning.  However, this also opens up home computers and home networks to more threats than ever.  One sad fact that needs to be addressed is that most home computer users (those who work or study from home) have not taken steps to secure their home computers, home network and their network-connected devices.  Securing all these will take a lot of time and a whole lot more time "researching".  As a public service, I will be writing a series of posts that should address this. What are the particular threats that faces peopl...

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...

Another news item caught my eyes today.  The news reports that new and sophisticated Business Email Compromise (BEC) attack has compromised three (3) British Private Equity firms.  The attack involved Phishing for ranking executives of the compromised companies and then actually tampering with the victims' email application.  This enabled the group to intercept and redirect the emails of the executives.  To make a long story short, the hacker group was able to run off with approximately 1.3 MILLION DOLLARS! This type of cyber attack is nothing new.  Phishing attacks had been victimizing people for years now.  I personally handled cases where an unsuspecting victims lost all their savings because they unwittingly opened Phishing emails that redirected them to fake banking websites.  The victims, s thinking that they are on their bank's website, will then attempt to log in and that's it -- their user ID and password has been stolen by hackers....

I just stumbled upon an alarming news that there is a "zero-day" vulnerability on the iPhone that can me exploited by a malware where a user does not even have to click on the malicious message to get infected.  According to the report: "At the time of writing, only the beta 13.4.5 version of iOS, released just last week, contains security patches for both zero-day vulnerabilities." At this point in time, the only way to protect ourselves from this threat is to avoid using the iPhone's default Mail application and simply access our emails direct from Gmail, Yahoo or other web-based clients. Full article here: Zero-Day Warning: It's Possible to Hack iPhones Just by Sending Mails

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...