Revolution Against Cyber Thefts

In the past few years, online shopping had increased tremendously.  With the growth of online purchase, the risk of credit card theft also grows proportionally.  To protect consumers, major credit card issuers and those involved in the credit card transaction have worked hard to maintain satisfactory security level.   Credit card issuers, today, provides free services that used to come with a membership fee.  One beneficial service is text, email or phone call notification on credit card transaction.  The feature can be activated in card holder's account settings.  Once activated and set to a desired notification preference, the card holder receives notification of the transaction made to the credit card.  The card holder can also receive notification of suspected transactions.  The mechanism works by studying how and where the credit card is being used.  When the card is used outside of the norm, the transaction will be stopped, and the no...

The unification of the two threat detector and hunter, Corvil and Endgame, was announced on July 20, 2017.   The merger marks the milestone for the next generation of cyber security defense system.     Corvil is a security company specializes in detection of threats in the network.   The company uses the performance and audit data to detect potential threats.   Other than the threat detection mechanism, Corvil also provides the communication between functions within the organization.    When IT members discover abnormal activity in the logs and performance data, they can transfer the information to the security members through the software for further investigation.   Once the security personnel verified the activity are not hacker's act, the information can be forwarded to network engineer. Endgame, on the other hands, provides centralized security protection of the endpoints.   Key features of Endgame are the detection of ...

When hearing the term virus, spyware, malware, adware you may think of hackers or crackers.   Think again!   To the public eyes, government agencies such as CIA are just as bad as those hackers that you are thinking of .   Their goals may be different, but the act is the same.   WikiLeaks, for the last few months, exposed some evidence of malware, backdoors, spyware, and trojans that the CIA has used.   Here are just a few from the website. Dark Matter - A firmware malware that targets Apple Mac and iPhones.   Once infected, the malware cannot be removed even when the OS is reinstalled.   The purpose for this malware is unknown. Hive - malware that targets servers and provides   HTTPs interface to the outside.   It is used by the remote machine for extracting information and remote command. Weeping Angel - an audio recording program.   Once infected the host, it uses the microphone to record audio and either send it ...

Back in the 90s when Linux had gained its momentum, many people, especially software developers, have preferred to use Linux over Windows.  All of the great things about Linux spread quickly.  A few years later, open source development started its trend. I must admit, open source development has helped the software industries enormously.  Development time reduced from years down to months, and months down to days. However, every good comes something bad.  It is the law of nature.  Every time should there be a virus outbreak; the first thought came to people's mind is Microsoft Windows. It must be MS Windows that are attacked . That is the truth, but why? It is simply because MS Windows gained a majority in the personal computer market.  There was no benefit for hackers to put malware into Linux machines. That is not true anymore.  Linux market has picked up with all of the enhanced interfaces, easy to install and update, very flexible, and most impor...

In one of the post s in a previous week, the hacker used DDoS as one of the attack strategies .  Let's talk about it a little bit.  What is it? When is it used? And how is it used? DDoS stand for distributed denial of service.  So what is denial of service mean, and why is it called distributed?  When a user browses the web, the browser sends the request to the webserver;   The webserver look at the request, process it and send back a response to the browser.   The web server keeps doing that for each request it receives.   When one machine sends many consecutive requests, the server will have to finish all of those messages before processing others.   Therefore requests from other computers will timeout based on the underlying communication protocol specification.   That is called denial of service.   One of the ways to prevent denial of service attack is to limit the number of requests from the same source within a specified ti...