The Not-too-dry-ware (Weeks 7-8)

Time for weeks 7-8! I know that this learning log's two days late (durrr) but that doesn't meant I won't put my heart into it. Let's see. Admittedly, I'm still looking into the Moodle files to see what exactly we discussed these past two weeks (yes, my memory is that bad). 

Hmmm here's an article that wasn't covered in the lectures. Security Bulletin, The Human Vulnerability: Exploits and Countermeasures. Who wrote it? It's none other than this blog's sole readership, Mr. Justin Pineda himself (gasp).

I confirm that yes, I did read the whole thing. And I have to agree with a lot of points. Humans are the weakest link. Humans do pose the biggest security threats. Emotions are the most exploitable factor of the human; funnily enough, emotions do make the man. Trust is exploited. Recreational desire is exploited. Alarm is exploited. The degree of how much a person can read another person's future actions through their emotional habits is really rather remarkable. So much more amazing is the fact that alarm, which is supposed to raise a person's immediate awareness, is actually a danger as a long-term effect.

As a finishing note, I have to say that I was amazed by the things that social engineering can do. I have never really heard of a case where a high-ranking person is tricked into revealing sensitive information by a single phone call. Is wittybunny.com a security risk too? (not that I use it).

Well, I have to go. While looking through the file in Moodle, I saw that the debate for tomorrow's supposed to be formalized :O. And in an Asian Parliamentary form no less. I gotta go prep up my teammates. So ciao! See you in two weeks, where hopefully I'd have a thought up of a blog name by then.

Weeks 5-6:Cyber Crime's Slimy Side

The one thing that imprinted itself into my mind the most is the lesson about laws and rights concerning what constitutes for a computer-related activity to be illegal. The knowledge of all these laws were put to the test when we were subjected to this wacky yet typically complicated use case about Pam, which happens to be my nickname, which means that I had to endure the constant ribbing of my teammates whilst solving this particular problem. But I digress. Pam is apparently a journalist who wrote and published an article incriminating this political figure. Gasp. A guilty political figure, who would have thought that politicians could do that? Apparently, the leads from the article all turned out to be true. Now, here's the twister, the information was swiped by a hacker from the politician's email, and was handed over to Pam. Now who was at fault? If we were to gather all the acquitting information, the only one we could think of was that if the politician didn't have something to hide in the first place, then maybe he wouldn't have gotten into trouble. Evidence against her, on the other hand, is quite large, but is made difficult due to the fact that although she did knowingly accept "dirty" information. The best laws that we think that she violated were some sections underneath the Fourth Amendment concerning illegal access of information, the one about violating the right of releasing information which may cause embarrassment to a person, as well as about three more which I won't mention anymore since they are almost on par with the kind of violation that the earlier two that I had mentioned.

That exercise was really tiring by the way. Not to mention bamboozling.