HACKLOG

Senior Policy Advisor - Africa, of the Internet Society, Verengai Mabika, on 10 April 2018, posted about Internet shutdowns1 happening in Chad due to ongoing political unrests. In the report he mentions about the continuous disruptions of Internet and social media services since the 2nd of April; although it is not the first occurrence in 2018. There were earlier reports of Internet shutdowns in Chad in January 2018 and also a much longer 8-months social media cutoff in 2016 during the elections. [Read More]

Earlier this year a major privacy scandal rocked the tech industry. It started with the revelations1 of Christopher Wylie, a former employee of Cambridge Analytica, in which Wylie stated how Cambridge Analytica harvested data of Facebook users through their developed apps and how the data collected was used to predict & even influence the choices of American voters. Slowly, as more information was revealed, it became apparent that the privacy scandal was not limited to the U. [Read More]

About a week ago CTS Labs, a Tel Aviv-based cybersecurity startup, made a public disclosure on vulnerabilities affecting AMD Ryzen and EPYC processors. Linus Torvalds reacted1 harshly to those premature claims: “When was the last time you saw a security advisory that was basically ‘if you replace the BIOS or the CPU microcode with an evil version, you might have a security problem?’ Yeah.” Various media reports spoke lenghily about the CTS Labs reports. [Read More]

Amidst media reports on the privacy breach by Cambridge Analytica & Facebook, the latter announced1 hiring digital forensics firm, Stroz Friedberg, to investigate the claims. We have hired a digital forensics firm, Stroz Friedberg, to conduct a comprehensive audit of Cambridge Analytica. Cambridge Analytica has agreed to comply and afford the firm complete access to their servers and systems. We have approached the other parties involved — Christopher Wylie and Aleksandr Kogan — and asked them to submit to an audit as well. [Read More]

A case related to a fake biometric ID card was reported last1 December. It was big news because if the card issued was indeed biometric & similar to the ones issued by the MNIC, then it would be extremely difficult for someone to deduce it’s fake without a card reader to authenticate a biometric reading. There were arrests but no further information came through media regarding the police investigation that followed; until today. [Read More]

For about almost a decade the German city of Munich remained a pioneer of “Linux migration” when it would come to the public sector institutions. It was a big win1 for the open source software community. Munich even had its own brewed Linux distribution called LiMux2, the “M” standing for Munich. In late 2017 though news3 came that the Munich city council decided to roll-back to Microsoft. While that was definitely a saddening news for the community, around the same time the Spanish city of Barcelona decided to adopt open source software. [Read More]

The fifth season of History’s show Vikings premiered1 last week. I am subscribed to Netflix and unfortunately it’s scheduled for December. Even worse perhaps it won’t be available on Netflix Mauritius. Meanwhile the internet is full of spoilers about the “delights” of the 2 hours long premiere (episodes 1 & 2). Funny thing is that while searching about Vikings on the internet something peculiar appeared in Google search results. Indeed, the linux. [Read More]

In the morning of Friday 1 December 2017 I saw a few people writing about a fake biometric ID card case on Facebook. It all started after it was reported1 on the radio. It’s reported that fraudsters attempted to retrieve money from the State Bank of Mauritius and the Mauritius Commercial Bank using fake biometric identity cards. Thanks to the bank officials who promptly alerted police the people involved in the scam network were apprehended. [Read More]

20 hours ago, Lemi Orhan Ergin, a software craftsman from Turkey, tweeted Apple to draw the latter’s attention to a security issue. It was not a vulnerability that required advanced skills to exploit. Dear @AppleSupport, we noticed a HUGE security issue at MacOS High Sierra. Anyone can login as "root" with empty password after clicking on login button several times. Are you aware of it @Apple? — Lemi Orhan Ergin (@lemiorhan) November 28, 2017 [Read More]

On the 28th November 2017 IBM announced1 it would stop supporting TLS 1.0 and 1.1 in several of its cloud products as from the 1st of March 2018. TLS 1.2 will continue to be supported. The change follows IBM’s commitment to offering secure cloud services and adhere to industry best practices. Transport Layer Security (TLS) is a cryptographic protocol that allows HTTPS to conduct secure transactions on the Internet. TLS 1. [Read More]