Freelance Word Punk

[Wavey Davey and dwindera are long since dead, but Davey Winder lives on as 'happygeek' a.k.a the Freelance Word Punk. Welcome to my annoyingly interesting, or should that be interestingly annoying, IT security related ramblings]

Sunday, May 19, 2013

Indian hackers take aim at Pakistan data during two year attack

Security researchers at ESET have revealed that a prolonged and highly targeted data stealing attack aimed at Pakistan, using fake PDF documents, appears to have originated in India.

Saturday, May 18, 2013

iPhone apps for business travel

Travel is high-tech - especially for business travellers who need to stay in touch with the office and keep communications secure. An iPhone or iPad can be a handy tool to finding your way around an unfamiliar city, but now it can also be used to check in at your hotel - as our feature about hotel tech in this month's issue of PC Pro reveals. If you have an iPhone or iPad, these are the ten apps to download before your next business trip.

How to fix Facebook: Social Fixer

Facebook has been badly broken for some time, and, since it appears Mark Zuckerberg can’t be bothered to fix it, we’ll have to do it ourselves. Here's how...

Wednesday, May 15, 2013

The new 24/7 email paradigm

A new survey commissioned by IT solutions specialist GFI Software concludes that, for the vast majority of workers in the small to medium-sized business (SMB) sector at least, the conventional nine-to-five/five day working week is dead; and right there holding the smoking gun is email. The survey, independently conducted and blind, of 500 employees within the UK SMB workspace, looked at work-related email habits around usage both during the accepted working day and after hours. Although, having looked closely at the results of the survey, the truth of the matter is that the boundaries between work and home have become so blurred as to be almost hypothetical. The fact that 74.6% of people asked admitted that they check their work email at the weekend should come as no surprise at all. I know I do. That said, I'm not amongst the 44% who check work-related email after 11pm although I will admit to checking my inbox while on holiday just like 53.7% of folk do. Outside of 'normal' work hours, 11% check email in real time (whatever that may be) and 27.4% check email 'several times' a day (whatever that may be).

"Cloudy is as cloudy does" - a motto for a new beginning

Users should see cloud as an opportunity to transform their businesses and not look for the negatives

Saturday, May 11, 2013

Game Over: Battlefield 3 DDoS attack

A couple of years ago, a 17 year old was arrested for his part in a denial of service attack against gamers playing the online multiplayer version of Call of Duty: Black Ops. The teenager was accused of selling cheat software called 'Phenom Booter' which prevented others from playing (it's a shell booter) while at the same time enabling the player to boost their scores. As someone who is a bit of a Black Ops obsessive (currently fast approaching 9th Prestige level on Black Ops 2) any kind of cheating really gets my goat. But one that involves preventing me, and others, from playing at all really is at the top of the lame behaviour pile. Which is why I was disappointed to see that Battlefield 3 was taken offline by a DDoS attack earlier this week.

Insurance for cloud - is it a liability or a benefit?

As Cloud Pro reported last week, the introduction of liability insurance for Cloud Service Providers is a move towards offering higher levels of data assurance to end user clients. The Cloud Industry Forum (CIF) has warned against business factoring the provision of such insurance into the CSP selection process too heavily, pointing out that ultimately it is the end user who must take responsibility for their own data. I'd go even further, and suggest that cloud insurance provision could actually be a liability and as such shouldn't be part of the selection process at all.

Monday, May 06, 2013

Javascript Twitter injection launches Man-in-the-Browser attacks

Dana Tamir, Enterprise Security Director for Trusteer has recently uncovered a variation of the TorRAT banking data malware which has been actively configured to target Twitter users. The attack works by "injecting Javascript code into the victim’s Twitter account page" Tamir says, adding that the malware "collects the user’s authentication token, which enables it to make authorized calls to Twitter's APIs, and then posts new, malicious tweets on behalf of the victim". These tweets are used, of course, to spread the malware within the social networking circle by leveraging the trust that is implicit in such networks. Twitter users, generally speaking, follow people and accounts that they trust. When these accounts are compromised by such an attack it becomes quite easy to persuade followers to click through to drive-by-malware pages, simply courtesy of the level of implied trust invested in the original poster.

Thursday, May 02, 2013

Big Data and cloud security, a story of dangerous liaisons

There are plenty of comparisons between Big Data and cloud -not least the dangers to security

Tuesday, April 30, 2013

Facebook Founder Mark Zuckerberg: In His Own Words

From college dropout to one of the world's youngest self-made billionaires, there is no doubting that Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has made quite an impression in his 28 years on this planet. But who is he really? You could go watch 'The Social Network' movie I guess, but all that does is tell you who he is through the eyes of a scriptwriter and the Hollywood machine. Better, you could trawl the Internet for biographies about and quotes from the man. The trouble with that approach is putting everything in some kind of context, coupled with filtering through all the half-truths, downright lies and inconsequential nonsense out there, takes both a lot of time and a fair amount of background understanding to start with. Best, then, to let someone else do the hard work and track down the relevant and insightful comments from the man himself, organize them by timeline and topic, put them into that context and top and tail them with biographical analysis. That's what George Beahm has done with his book 'The Boy Billionaire: Mark Zuckerberg In His Own Words'.
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BEING VIRTUAL

My most recent book 'Being Virtual: who you really are online' was published by Wiley (in conjunction with the Science Museum) and is still available. Find out more by CLICKING HERE or order from Amazon by CLICKING HERE.





Davey Winder is a three time winner of the Information Security Journalist of the Year award (2006/2008/2010) and received the prestigious Enigma Award for his lifetime contribution to information security journalism in 2011.



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Davey Winder
A freelance technology journalist for 20 years, I have been Contributing Editor of the biggest selling IT magazine in the UK (PC Pro) for most of them. An Editorial Fellow at Dennis Publishing, I also contribute to IT Pro and Cloud Pro. In the Spring of 2012 I was diagnosed with Wet Macular Degeneration, and within the space of three weeks lost much of the sight in my right eye. With a 50/50 chance of the same happening to my (already lazy and rather poor) left eye within the next five years, I quickly began looking for ways to continue working with 'low vision' and kick-started a campaign in conjunction with PC Pro magazine and the Royal National Institute for the Blind (RNIB) to encourage awareness of the problem amongst software and web developers in order that they might implement small UI changes that would make a big difference to tens of thousands of users.
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Read more by Davey

  • PC Pro
  • IT Pro
  • Cloud Pro
  • Infosecurity
  • DaniWeb

Awards

  • Enigma award for lifetime contribution to InfoSec journalism (2011)
  • Information Security Journalist of the Year (2010)
  • Best Generic IT Security Feature (2010)
  • Information Security Journalist of the Year (2008)
  • Best Information Security News Story (2008)
  • Best IT Security Feature (2007)
  • IT Security Journalist of the Year (2006)
  • Best IT Security Feature (2006)
  • Technology Journalist of the Year (1996)
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