Towards a Cyber Resilience strategy (Cyber Security Awareness Month – Oct 2016)

As most of you already know, October is Cyber Security awareness month. The aim of the Cyber Security awareness month is to raise awareness across the international community about cyber threats, discuss best practices, and educate the public and private sector, on how to stay safe online.

Cyber Security is promoted extensively during this month and many events are being organized with the sole purpose to engage and educate public and private sector entities, while provide them with the necessary tools and resource to stay safe when connected online. Given the opportunity let’s talk about the UK’s Cyber Security Clusters and how you could get to engage, participate, network and most importantly ask any questions that you currently have regarding your organizations cyber security posture and staying safe online.

New laptop with a noisy (annoying) fan

I will keep this short. If you bought a new laptop (it can happen for desktop computers as well) and the manufacturer did not make sure the fan is completely silent (and you really want to punch them in the face because it is not 1998) then I suggest:

a) check if there is a firmware update for your laptop (sometimes there is and it fixes many issues)
b) you download this little utility before you start breaking things around the house and see if it works for your make/model. 

https://github.com/hirschmann/nbfc/releases 

(at the time of writing this blog post the version of the utility was 1.4.2)

Hope this helps, but make sure you keep an eye on your temperatures via an utility like HWmonitor to make sure the cooling still works properly. 

Securing Online Gaming 2016

The challenge of continuous security are going to be discussed at this year's annual "Securing Online Gaming" in London, on the 4th October 2016. It is a great to be among such amazing speakers and have the opportunity to speak about the challenges of securing online gaming. 

I will be representing DeepRecce which already has a leading role in the market when it comes to its cyber security solutions and its under 15 minutes deployable managed SOC solution across any number of hosts. 

My talk will discuss Online Gaming towards Cyber Resilience, and more specifically it will focus on:

• Today's challenges & requirements towards security online gaming
• How attacks are evolving, and what should we expect
• Taking steps for an effective Cyber Resilience strategy

The event will take place near the St. Paul's Cathedral and The Barbican. This is directly opposite the Museum of London. Located at 200 Aldersgate etc.venues St Paul's is a state of the art conference centre with the largest room holding up to 400 along with a further 12 rooms for conference breakouts, training and meetings.

44CON 2016

Another year, another 44CON in London. A line-up of great talks, and a very good opportunity to catch-up with friends from the industry. The event took place between 16-18/Sep 2016, at the ILEC Conference Centre. 

This year you were able to solder your badge while you were there. There was a nice corner dedicated to soldering, with solder irons provided and all the bits to make it work. 

I ended up making six of those in order to help out a couple of friends. It was really easy to make and really fun to do, especially when it started working as it should. 

The badge is called HIDIOT and it is short for HID IO Toolkit. :) The Human Interface Device Input/Output Toolkit (HIDIOT) is a USB-based board for manipulating and experimenting with USB HID class devices. The version given out at 44CON is unreleased. In effect, we decided to make our badge a piece of 0day hardware.

How to train your facebook ads..

Most of you use Ad Blockers and I am happy that you do for all sort of reasons, which I will not discuss here. This blog post is about how you can train the ads you get on different websites (mostly on social media) based on what you care less. Yes, that is right. If you really want to avoid being distrusted or even tempted from clicking on (sometimes malicious) ad links, then what is better than training the system behind the scenes to show you ads only on things that you really don't care about at all. :D

I will use the example of Facebook, which I have been doing for a long time and I realised just know that I haven't actually shared this with you all. 

What you see on the left hand side is a print screen from the ads I get on Facebook. Those side ads are not a problem due to way they are being displayed but, based on these ads, you get similar ads in your news feed as well. 

Thus, by training these ads, you will get relevant ads in your news feed as well. As you can see on your left, all the ads I get are about sports and sometimes about music. 

The reason is because I DO NOT CARE AT ALL about sports, or what is happening in the music industry. 

When you click to hide an ad, Facebook asks you the following:

 Why did you hide it?

 - I don't care about this

 - I keep seeing this

 - It's offensive or inappropriate 

 - Other

 - I want to see something else

When you are presented with these options, you just need to use them in a clever way. Anything that seems like you would be interested, lets say politics, environment, science, space exploration, ninjas, you select any on the options that classify it as "something you don't care". 

On the contrary, when you get ads that you really never cared about, such as sports, or gambling, you keep leaving these ads in your feed like it really matters to you. 

Doing that 3-4 times in a day, for a couple of days, trains the engine behind Facebook and starts displaying ads that you don't really care. 

Actually, our brains learn to ignore ads after a while, but when the content is irrelevant to your liking, your brain ignores them completely. I know it sounds weird, but you will end up going through your news feed and your brain will keep ignoring the ads. Especially ads that you don't care about, in such a way that you won't ever remember seeing the targeted add. Trust me and try it! ;)