Tag: hacking

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Weekly Wrap 133: Instagram, infosec and random nativity

Suburban Nativity: click to embiggenMonday 17 to Sunday 23 December 2012 was a week filled with plenty of work, plenty of stress and a small amount of exhaustion.

The media outputs are listed below, as usual. Towards the end of the week the long series of 5am and earlier starts was beginning to catch up with me, and on Thursday I accidentally slept in until lunchtime — and that was truly wonderful.

I decided to continue that level of sloth on the weekend. Well, apart from today, obviously. As mentioned below, there’s still quite a bit left to do before I can finally break for Christmas.

Also this week I dropped and broke my Samsung Galaxy S III, necessitating an urgent replacement. While doing that I discovered some gotchas with migrating data to a new phone, and I’ll write about that after Christmas.

Podcasts

  • Patch Monday episode 168, “2012 infosec review: Focus on crime, not cyberwar”. The second of our two year-end conversations. The panelists are Paul Ducklin, Sophos’ head of technology for Asia Pacific; Chris Gatford, director of penetration testing firm HackLabs; Jon Callas, chief technology officer at Entrust, and now also of secure messaging provider Silent Circle; and Stephen Wilson, managing director of Lockstep Group, which provides advice and analysis on digital identity and privacy technologies.

Articles

Media Appearances

Corporate Largesse

  • On Wednesday I had a very pleasant lunch indeed at Bistrode at the Hotel CBD in Sydney with a couple of chaps from Trend Micro. Needless to say, it was on their tab.

The Week Ahead

There’s tonight and one working day left before Christmas. In that time I have to produce a Patch Monday podcast, my end-of-year story for Crikey, and a follow-up to Friday’s story for CSO Online. I’ll be busy for the next 24 hours, though for all those things I’ve already got a plan in mind so they should be straightforward.

But then Tuesday is Christmas Day, and from then through to the end of the week I have precisely nothing planned. Sure, there’s a few little work-related things that’ll need to be polished off, but there are no pressing commitments. This pleases me immensely.

[Photo: Suburban Nativity, photographed on Stony Creek Road in Beverly Hills, Sydney, on 15 December 2012. The householders must do this every year, because the same nativity scene is visible in Google Street View imagery from December 2009.]

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Weekly Wrap 126: Wattle, sniffle and SCADAgeddon

Monday 29 October to Sunday 4 November 2012 was a busy week, made slightly less busy by the need to recover from the throat infection identified last week and then, because I was run down, fatigue that was probably a mix of a cold and hay fever.

Hence the photograph of the wattle I’ve posted here. It is to blame.

Dear Plant Kingdom, if I spread my genetic material all over you the way you do over me, I’d be arrested! Please behave yourself.

[Update 1545 AEDT: I am reliably informed that the hay fever is unlikely to be caused by wattle pollen.]

Podcasts

Articles

Media Appearances

Also, the Sydney Opera House has posted the video of my Festival of Dangerous Ideas panel, I Share Therefore I Am. I’ll write more about that in due course.

Corporate Largesse

  • On Monday evening I had a few beers with Michael McKinnon from AVG Australia and New Zealand, which they paid for.
  • On Tuesday morning I attended the breakfast launch of Windows Phone 8 at the Blue Bar,level 36 of the Shangri-La Hotel, overlooking Sydney Harbour. Microsoft paid for that, obviously.

The Week Ahead

Next week is pretty much all about Singapore. On Monday I’ll head down to Sydney and get some writing out of the way. Then on Tuesday it’s Singapore Airlines flight SQ212 departing Sydney at 0905 AEDT and arriving in Singapore mid-afternoon local time.

Wednesday is Verizon Business’ APAC Media Day, a five-hour meeting followed by cocktails. On Thursday I’m visiting the hospitality tent at the Barclays Singapore Open golf tournament as Verizon’s guest. Friday through Sunday has yet to be finalised, but there’ll be at least two articles to write and a podcast to produce.

Oh, and a social life.

My flight back to Sydney SQ231 leaves Singapore at 45 minutes past midnight Sunday night — so technically that’s Monday morning.

[Photo: Wattle near Railway Parade, near Wentworth Falls, one of the causes of my hay fever this week.]

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Visiting Coffs Harbour for FlexibilITy 2012

The travels continue. I’m heading to Coffs Harbour in northern New South Wales next month to speak at Flexibility 2012, the 15th Annual IT Conference for Local Government.

You’ll be surprised, I’m sure, to discover that I’m talking about information security.

The Hacker Threat: Let’s bust some myths

The headlines portray the internet as a scary, scary place. Anonymous hacktivists mock the powerful, defacing websites and stealing vast troves of confidential information. Criminals plunder bank accounts and destroy credit ratings. Shady “nation-state actors” infiltrate secure government and corporate networks, stealing every secret they can find.

Information security companies publish research “proving” the vast scale of global online crime. Defence experts point to the vast sums being spent on military-grade hacking and talk of looming cyberwar. Of course both groups have a vested interest in talking up the threat.

The hackers are certainly real, ranging from youthful vandals with unfocussed quasi-political motivations to highly-organised international crime gangs and well-funded national defence and intelligence agencies.

Sophisticated hacking tools are now developed by professional software development teams. They can be bought in the online underground for just a few hundred dollars, complete with technical support provided under a service level agreement.

So how should organisations respond?

The threat landscape is certainly changing, so new tools will certainly be required. But it’s important to understand the real threats and their relative significance, and respond as part of a coherent strategy, rather than reacting to the latest panic.

This session will present an overview of current internet security threats based on the latest research with the bovine excrement filtered out.

I’ll be in Coffs Harbour from the morning of Wednesday 14 November through to the afternoon of Saturday 17 November. Apart from the conference itself, I’m open to suggestions.

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Talking spear phishing on Balls Radio

My regular spot on Phil Dobbie’s Balls Radio returned this week after a wee break, and the topic was spear phishing.

Most of what we discussed was based on newly-released research from Websense and my as-yet-unreported conversations with their guys.

Here’s the audio of my segment. If you’d like more, have a listen to the full episode.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 14:00 — 6.3MB)

The program is no longer broadcast on FM99.3 Northside Radio, it’s purely a podcast. You can subscribe over at the website.

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Weekly Wrap 122: Fatigue and a helpful waratah

My week Monday 1 to Sunday 7 October 2012 was a reminder that travel and on-stage performances can be more exhausting than it feels at the time. Especially when you’re working while everyone else has a public holiday.

Out of curiosity, I just scrolled back through my calendar to find the last week when I hadn’t been working in some way or other. I scrolled back more than four years without finding such a week. I decided to stop before it all become too depressing.

That said, I know the answer. It was nearly five years, when I spent some time in Bangkok.

Podcasts

Articles

Media Appearances

None.

Corporate Largesse

None.

The Week Ahead

So far I know that Monday will be spent producing the Patch Monday podcast, and on Tuesday I’ll head into Sydney for a media lunch with NetSuite boss Zach Nelson.

I’ll stay in Sydney overnight so that on Wednesday I can meet Allison Cerra, author of Identity Shift: Where Identity Meets Technology in the Networked-Community Age. I’m sure you can guess why.

The rest is a bit disorganised. There’s an Internet Governance Forum in Canberra on Thursday and Friday, though no-one’s asked me to go yet. Yes, that’s a hint. But I also seem to have less commissioned writing locked in for this month than I thought I did a week ago. I should probably do something about that.

[Photo: Waratah near Bunjaree, which I believe is a specimen of Telopea speciosissima, photographed near Bunjaree Cottages earlier today. Despite living in New South Wales for something approaching two decades, this is the first time I’ve seen the state flower in its native habitat.]