Point of Attraction

Everything has multiple perspectives. A point of attraction could become the point of attack. Example is setting up web site for presence in the cyber world. The business people wish to have high hit rates of the web site to enhance brand visibility, collect surfer behaviors for analytics, thus pushing the right level of promotion and adjust market strategy. All these are to prove the ROI for web site TCO. The technical people wish to lock down the web site to avoid being defaced or being planted with malicious codes for persistent threats. All these will inevitably affect certain functionalities or incurred extra cost. Such investment is to prove avoidance cost rather than ROI because people generally expect cyber secure - rather than by investing $X, $Y will be gained. Bridging the gap will require cyber governance at the top level to set out cyber directives within an organization, resolve issues and have a final say for conflicts arising,...
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Trust #2

When Internet is just launched to the consumer market, it's costly. Need to subscribe the service from your local Internet Service Provider (ISP) and connect from home via telephone line with dial-up modem. Both bandwidth and data volume are limited. Technology advancement makes the Internet become a default facility for the community. Free wi-fi hotspots and free Internet kiosks are available. The important thing to note - do you trust these platforms? Even though the providers do not have malicious intend, are these devices secured from planting malicious tools to capture sensitive information? If you need to use Internet like this, limit to just web surfing without login to search information. Always bring your own device as an integral part of your wallet when travelling. Use a VPN gateway service if possible to defeat MITM (Man-In-The-Middle) attack because certain web proxies are able to intercept TLS (Transport Layer Security, or https) traffic for content inspection. You...
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Trust

When you come across a free USB socket to charge your mobile device, will you trust and use it? You never know what is behind that your mobile device will connect to. Mobile device now contains lots of "useful" information for hacker. The information ranges from personal contact, photo, notes, corporate email to saved credentials. The best is to use own charging device. ...
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Real Image

Virtualization is great technology deployed in ICT (or even ICS). There are many merits for live system or application development but we must not forget: It is still the same platform subject to regular cyber maintenanceSame cyber protection like removing unused applications, disabling unused system services, using least privilge session to run application etc.Regular backup for recovery provision to minimize unplanned service interruption: whether conventional backup approach or real image of the virtualized environment ...
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Technology

Technology helps avoiding mistake, operating continuously and enforcing certain outcome. However, technology is designed and deployed by human. There must be faults during the above process (that's why we have patch Tuesday or so). In the illustrated vault, it has thick door and wall. That should be strong to withstand theft, physical attack or natural disaster to secure contents stored there. If the access to vault is not well managed, then the intended protection will be void. ...
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