Category: Personal Security

Watch your back

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InfoSec skills – Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT)

As a Small Business or individual, If you were going to hire a Private IT Security Professional here’s what you should be looking for.

Trust me I’m a Professional – Until Dawn™

Loving this 2016 IT Security Job Description

Experience as part of an incident response team (either in-house or as a consultant).

An ability to provide technical analysis and direction for investigations.

An understanding of networking protocols and infrastructure designs; including, firewall functionality, routing, encryption, host and network intrusion detection systems, load balancing, and other network protocols.

An understanding of the current vulnerabilities, response, and mitigation strategies used in cyber security.

Willing to work out of hours and public holidays as part of a shift Rota and when on call as needed.

Inherent passion for information security and service excellence.

An ability to analyse and reverse engineer various file types including providing dynamic and static analysis of malware artefacts and binaries as well as other malicious attack files.

Be able to complete post-mortem analysis of network logs, traffic flows and other activities to identify malicious activity on a network.

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Keep it Clean

I cannot be bothered to delete Exchangeable Image File (EXIF) data recently so if you dig deep enough you’ll know when and where I took this image and on what device.

Cyber Crime, Cyber Bullies, Cyber Idiots…….and now Cyber Clean.

I saw this on a friend’s shelf and was sniggering for ages, marketing people enjoying the Cyber-hype.

Stick the word “Cyber” on everything

The product itself is pretty cool and basically a keyboard and device cleaner that works.

We are safe and clean

….….for now.

Available from JOKER in Hong Hong…honest I’m not making this stuff up.

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Disturbing Emotion Disruptors (DMD)

Outside of being insured up to the eyeballs,  there are things I tend to avoid thinking about and planning for.

You would think that I would have learned by now.

Personal disaster recover planning: 
physical injury, economic injury, emotional injury

Separations or Divorce planning:
Not always till Death do us Part

Last Will & Testament: But I have no money

Relocation planning: I really hate moving

Burial plan: what does it matter, I’m dead anyway

Data recovery plan: We assume the info will be somewhere

Friend and Family communication plan:
we assume we will find them on Social Media

Family Password sharing:
who has the NetFlix password or the British Gas log-in?
No mobile, no money, no place to sleep.

No one is immune. Following a personal disaster, we are on our own for an unknown period of time and typically the massive emotion trauma, loss of communications, and poor access to resources can set you back for years and for some it is unrecoverable.

I kinda have this info together but nuff information is only in my head buried and unreachable by others.

You have to be in a “good” place mentally to start working out a strategy to handle DMD and I’m far for that right now.

…to be continued by 22-October.

Way too much personal conflict going.  I see the traits clearly.

Lateness at work
Unscheduled days off
Emergency time off
Excessive use of personal phone
Difficulty concentrating on InfoSec technical detail.

No medication needed today.

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No, No, No Way

Outside the InfoSec community and Paranoid conspiracy addicts, I seldom come across individuals who routinely check themselves to see how open they are to attacks.

Handy Hacker toolkits always include

Ransomware
Phishing Vulnerability
“New to YouTube" Vulnerability
Bot Infection
Browser Attack
Anonymizer Usage (hide yourself tools)
Data leakage 
(on purpose or by sheer end-user stupidity)

In the meantime, while everyone is debating the impact of leaving Europe, the Investigatory Powers Act 2016 is filtering down to individuals as it’s now a  tool for “lawful” interception of data.

So now you gotta look out for the bad guys, the marketing people AND Big Brother.

Solution: Encrypt EVERYTHING

Things just got Real…gonna go take my some Diphenhydramine so I can catch at least 6 hours deep sleep tonight.