Author: Robby Pedrica
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Authenticator App Security
One would think that your authenticator app would be a secure app? Right? But what happens when your authenticator app tracks your usage and records your behaviours? Well it seems that this is a fairly common practice amongst even the most popular of apps. Naomi Brockwell recently did a YT video discussing the results of…
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SSL/TLS Certificate lifetime redux
I wrote an article in 2020 about SSL/TLS Certificate lifetimes, the upshot of which was that the certificate/browser industry had just moved to 1yr (398 days to be precise) certificate expiries. I noted the following: There have been a number of attempts over the years to reduce the lifetime of certificates as they apply to…
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KeePassXC – a review
Password managers have seen a new focus (both good and bad) over the last couple of years especially in mainstream news and media. With security folk like Rachel Tobac and Shannon Morse pushing the security mantra (in a relatable way), a lot more people are seeing the light so-to-say and coming around to the fact…
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IT Security for the Small Business
Structured IT Security is generally seen as the domain of the medium to large enterprise as it can be an expensive exercise to implement properly, and requires hard-to-find skills. However, there are a lot of areas a small business can tackle to improve their security status considerably without breaking the bank. I’ll simplify this process…
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GPC / Global Privacy Control
Do Not Track It’s quite amazing to think that DNT or Do Not Track was first proposed back in 2009 – 13 years ago. This was a first-stab method at the issue of website privacy and the horrendous marketing machine that is the internet. DNT was designed to allow users to opt-out of website tracking,…
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Social Media security
Keeping yourself secure on the internet remains a very important component of our daily lives seeing as internet access is so ingrained in day-to-day activities. Think ride sharing, online banking, retail shopping, email and so on. Social media specifically remains a prime attack vector for malicious activities impacting on many internet users’ security. Yet the…
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FortiGate SD-WAN
SD-WAN (software defined WAN) is a topic that is much discussed in the last couple of years but one that is also the least understood. One of the reasons for this is that there are different implementations of SD-WAN leading to misunderstandings in how SD-WAN is used. So what is SD-WAN? It’s an overlay technology…
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The little camera that could
IT and Network Security is a tough arena. Keeping networks, systems and data secure from what can only be called a total onslaught of malware and other malicious attacks, is a difficult task. What makes the task even more difficult is the general indifference of (especially) SMEs to the potential harm that can be caused…
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Storm in a WhatsApp teacup?
Facebook’s recent update of the Terms of Service for Whatsapp has got a lot of people riled up. And quite rightly so. The core of this issue is not privacy of information as many believe, but rather pure business economics – let’s cover the basics first. There are 2 primary considerations for using cloud services…
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Mikrotik guest VLAN with Cap AC
It’s past time to create additional VLANs on my home network for IoT and guests, so I decided to take the plunge and see what configuration was required on my Mikrotik AP. The basic physical network topology is: internet <—> firewall <—> L2 switches <—> CapAC <—> users As I’m not using an L3 switch…
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Centos bails
Wow. What a week. I’m almost not sure to start but let’s give this a go. Red Hat’s had a pretty hard week convincing Centos users that their announcement Tues (15th Dec) deprecating Centos 8 (and Centos downstream in general), is A Good Thing(tm). How did this come about? Centos is one of the most…
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The trouble with SPAM
The queries I’ve been getting lately requesting checks on whether a particular email is spam or not, has been enlightening. It’s clear there’s a problem. Somewhere. Email users are not seeing the “wood for the trees” no matter the fact that spam has been an entrenched part of our lives for a couple of decades…
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SSL/TLS Certificate lifetime
The SSL/TLS certificate revocation system (CRL and OCSP) is broken. This is a fact known for a long time by the whole certificate industry. Long-lived certificates that have issues (eg. a certificate that was fraudulently issued), hang around on the Internet for extended periods (currently up to 3 years) potentially causing security and authenticity issues.…
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Browser Security
Browser technology and security events always make for interesting reading especially due to the fact that we do the majority of our online work these days through browsers, be it general web surfing, accessing enterprise apps or managing systems and devices. Browser features and security are therefore critical – this shouldn’t even need to be…
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Cloud Services and Availability
From the way that Cloud vendors promote their wares and how apologists fawn over these services, one would think that Cloud was the be all and end all of computing. The fact is that we’ve been here before and Cloud is just a more advanced form of central or mainframe computing from the 60s and…