RAID is not backup

A number of friends have recently sought my advice on NAS and RAID solutions for storing their personal data. I do not usually give brand recommendations but I will discuss the technology involved. I have never used RAID nor found a need for it, this is because RAID (Redundant Array of ...

The Golden Key - TSA Locks and Encryption

Earlier this year, TSA master keys were leaked and ordinary folks were supposedly able to 3D print these keys and open any luggage with a TSA lock. Despite the huge uproar, I personally feel that it is not that big of a deal because Valuables go in hand carry, clothes go in luggage. Few people ...

Xenserver V2P Migration

I have using xenserver as my hypervisor for the past 6 months and have run a number of VMs on it. However, there were some deal breakers which led me to migrate back to running Ubuntu as the base OS and running the VMs in VirtualBox on top of Ubuntu. Lack of USB passthrough support - Can only ...

Verifying JS Integrity

Yesterday, a CDN was hacked and malicious JS was served to a number of domains. Most websites make use of CDNs to serve up JS so as to reduce page load time. How do we protect ourselves from such attacks? I posed a similar question on Sec.SE some time back. Subresource Integrity is a new ...

Adding hostnames or PTR records to piwik

If you are using piwik and desire to know exactly where your website visitors come from, this hack will allow you to display the hostname or PTR record beside the IP addresses on the piwik dashboard. The Ip2Hostname plugin logs down the visitor's hostname in an additional column but provides no ...

Negative space

Sometimes, the lack of information is valuable information. The Washington Post reports that according to unnamed current and former US officials, the CIA pulled "a number of officers" from the US Embassy in Beijing as a precautionary measure following the breach — precisely because their names ...

First Cyberinsurance claim?

I first came across the term cyberinsurance earlier this year while attending an information session in DC. At that point, it was suggested that there needs to be a benchmark that takes into account the cyber risks that companies are facing, for it to be feasible for insurance companies to ...

2Gbps fibre is a gimmick

Singapore is the 2nd fastest country in the world in terms of fibre broadband speeds. However in my opinion, beyond a certain sweet spot of around 300mbps, any additional bandwidth brings about negligible benefit. 1) The server is the bottleneck. Let me use an analogy, you can widen the road in ...