Computer and Information Security

TC2027 Work with Ken is a complete different way to learn, it challenge your self to improve and to learn exploring the world/internet in a DIY way. I really enjoyed taking the course with him because it was a easy way to learn and to complete the course not to get a good grade but to get the knowledge expect to receive on this course. Course objective: Upon completion of this course, students will have gained an overview of the area of computer security and the basic knowledge needed to understand the risks, threats and vulnerabilities of computer systems in today's world, as well as the controls and protection methods against possible attacks, which are indispensable for these systems to work properly in contemporary companies. They will also be familiar with the existing national and international laws related to computer system security. Yes, for me the course objective was accomplished, and I strongly recommend to take any possible course with Ken, not only because h...

Dentro de los principales sistemas operativos MacOS es de los más importantes, el día de ayer se descubrió una vulnerabilidad que permitía que un usuario invitado tuviera privilegios de administrador con un simple cambio en el nombre del usuario y varios enters, Pueden ver el descubrimiento original aquí Lo más interesante de esto es que 19 horas más tarde Apple ya tenia disponible en su centro de descargas una actualización al sistema operativo que solucionaba el problema. No existe sistema perfecto pero la velocidad de reacción y el compromiso de los creadores a mantenerlo seguro, confiable y funcional es lo que hace que sus usuarios permanezcan ahí.

Cryptography has been here since we are, we have to remember that to break a cryptography system was the objective of the first computers but also that cryptography and security are always related on iT or other for example: Every poker player should learn a bit about cryptography. Because, in a way, playing poker is actually a form of cryptography. Let me explain. Cryptography is the science of encoding information. Typically encryption is used to encode communications between two parties so that a third party is unable to understand it. For millennia, people have been trying to encrypt their communications—and the field of cryptography has become increasingly important over the years. All of the innovation in cryptography is designed to address one problem. There is an inherent tradeoff between ease-of-use of a cryptographic method and its security. Interestingly, if you are interested only in security—making sure that no one can possibly break your code—and not at all in ea...

On this post I want to share some work I did on my company related with this topic and with collaboration with ESET.  

Easy the users and admins are humans and humans made mistakes  There were many times that because a mistake made by a human the system fail an thats a real issue when for example that human works at AWS and unintentionally breaks the internet of half of USA. It’s human to make errors but thankfully these errors can be 100% prevented. A mixture of strategies may help to prevent human errors from turning into security incidents. When looking at attacks today, most people think external attacks are the biggest problem for organizations and where they need to focus most of their energy. However, it is important to distinguish between the source of an attack and the cause of damage. While the source of most attacks is absolutely external, the cause of damage is often the accidental insider. Adversaries recognize that it is too hard to directly break into servers and compromise an organization externally. It is much easier to target an insider, trick that person into opening an...

Physicians, attorneys and other professionals whose job duties affect others' lives usually receive, as part of their formal training, courses that address ethical issues common to their professions. IT security personnel often have access to confidential data and knowledge about individuals' and companies' networks and systems that give them a great deal of power. That power can be abused, either deliberately or inadvertently. But there are no standardized training requirements for hanging out your shingle as an IT security consultant or in-house security specialist. Associations and organizations for IT pros are beginning to address the ethical side of the job, but again, there is no requirement for IT security personnel to belong to those organizations. Why are ethical guidelines needed? The education and training of IT professionals, including security specialists, usually focuses on technical knowledge and skills. You learn how to perform tasks, but with little ...

Just because it is secure we should always use https, actually right now as developers we have many options to use this protocol for free (GCP, Let's Encrypt). But, what it is http? Hyper Text Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS) is the secure version of HTTP, the protocol over which data is sent between your browser and the website that you are connected to. The 'S' at the end of HTTPS stands for 'Secure'. It means all communications between your browser and the website are encrypted. HTTPS is often used to protect highly confidential online transactions like online banking and online shopping order forms. Web browsers such as Internet Explorer, Firefox and Chrome also display a padlock icon in the address bar to visually indicate that a HTTPS connection is in effect. Benefits Customer information, like credit card numbers, is encrypted and cannot be intercepted Visitors can verify you are a registered business and that you own the domain Customers are more...

I found this  doc ument from Google that explains the best practices to this cases. GCP load balancing solution has DDoS mitigations built-in lowering the attack surface: configure ingress firewall rules (like iptables) network load balancing has port filtering. Any port that is not loadbalanced is dropped by GCP highly scaling frontend infrastructure HTTP/HTTPS loadbalancing can absorb and protect from IP spoofing and large SYN flood attacks. it has also fair-share allocation built-in  And Google Cloud Platform provides a number of features to defend against DDoS attacks. You can use these in conjunction with the above mentioned best practices and other measures tailored to your requirements to make your GCP deployment resilient to DDoS attacks. 

As I prefere to use services for all kind of users I decided to buy a comercial USB Drive on Walmart and use the brand software for encryption. It was very easy to install and use because the user interface, it ask me for a "secure" password +8digit, special character, lower and upper case, numbers. After the encryption my drive has and special "folder" when I can store files and access them by the interface. It has the application portable so I can access them on any Windows/MacOS device.

We commented last class about to have the right to delete our accounts and data from our providers so I decided to tray too errase an old Apple ID I "had" It's seams that is easy to close an account according the Apple website but it isn't  To erase an account I had to follow this steps: Answer the security questions Change my password Get an email and verify it Create a case to delete Call apple support with an case number Wait 20 min on the phone call Because I had a Developer Account scale the case to EUA Wait 15 min to get an Developer Representative  They have to re-check documentation and call me back I get an email to accept terms and condition TLDR  I get a call after two days to verify my request of close and agree by phone all the terms and conditions  I have to wait 48 h to gat my account deleted and my info erased

After the last class TC2027 on Monday 14 and Ken's suggestion of using an "strong" password  I was trying to figure what is the matter with our "regular" password when we activate a 2FA like an SMS, phone call or Google Authentication App.  So I research about it and made this small post about it. What I found was many examples about how 2FA and MFA resides on really normal transactions like credit cards, banks and doors, to say that we are using 2FA we should have 2 of: something you know something you have something you are   Witch basically is adding security layers to the  standard "something you know" user and password, based on that is easy to resolve my questions; 2 layers are better than just 1 and stronger layers improve security even further. Other point I found is that there is a problem on the recovery passwords features because normally this process avoid the use of 2FA so many services have implemente...