On the 6th of Mar, while performing routine maintenance on my server, bash commands suddenly stopped working. 1 2 3 4 $ pwd -bash: pwd: command not found $ ls -bash: ls: command not found At that point in time, apache web server was still running. I took the risk and asked for the server to be ...

While still on the topic of email fraud, I would like to touch on 419 scams, which are also known as Nigerian scams. Most of us routinely encounter such emails in our spam box, so it shouldn't be too alien to us. The modus operandi for such a scam is as follows. The scam artist first crafts an ...

A fraudster managed to email his way out of prison. Article here. The amount of trust that a lay person puts into emails today is quite alarming. Emails were first used in the 70s, when everyone knew everyone else on the network and trust was less of an issue that it is today. There used to be ...

While traveling in the US, I noticed that a considerable number of smaller food establishments used an iPad Point of Sale (POS) system. Given the number of POS vulnerabilities reported in the past year, I wondered if the iPad would be a more secure POS platform compared to the traditional ...

Applications such as Pushbullet strive to integrate our devices by mirroring notifications received on an android phone onto a windows laptop. I can read and even reply SMSes without the need to pick up my phone. Nevertheless, we must be careful when using them since One Time Passwords(OTP) are ...

I am always pissed off when I discover that a site I use is a plaintext offender. Well, if they are mom and pop establishments that do not deal with money or personal data, I might exhibit a wee bit of tolerance. However, large cooperations have no excuse especially since salting and hashing is ...

Piazza is a learning management system that allows students to post questions which are then answered by fellow students or the lecturer. One of the features of Piazza is anonymous posting where students can choose not to reveal their names. Unfortunately, correlations can be made through ...

Background : Uber or one of its contractors uploaded a security key to a public github gist. Malicious actors were able to use the key to access the database and made away with personal details of 50,000 Uber drivers. Article here. This is one of those pesky little problems with version ...