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Thursday, February 02, 2006
Ng: Lessons for bloggers
By Wilson Ng
Wired Desktop
The other day, my blog site (personal website on www.ngkhai.net/bizdrivenlife) was hacked. I mean defaced. A group that claims to be an Iranian organization hacked it. I reckon this has something to do with a standoff between the United States and Iran, and some Iranians took it upon themselves to try to penetrate as many United States websites and declare that they too, have capability to do these kind of things. They come in and try to penetrate your site, and when they do, they either steal or erase all the files.
My blog site was stored on a US server, something that I pay for with a few dollars a month. It was where I put my thoughts on management and life, in general. And it was nothing official, so I did not host it on our company servers. I did not pay any particular attention on security either, since it was not storing anything valuable like credit cards (I would have gone crazy if it did!). The servers were running on Apache and uses a personal publishing system called WordPress, which is a fairly popular blog tool. This was written in PHP, and I find it a really great tool. In fact, among serious bloggers, WordPress is one of the most popular software available.
The site also hosts picture galleries, which run using a popular picture gallery system called Coppermine. It is also developed in PHP and uses a backend database MYSQL.
I talked to the US Web host providers and they said the hackers must have been able to utilize a security hole in one of the systems I used. They must have used that to gain access to the directory and erased all the files. Luckily, there were backup files. So while we did lose some amount of files, the site was back up and running in two hours.
Here are some lessons to be learned from the incident:
l Things like these happen, because you think they won’t. Who would be interested in my blog site? Why would they attack it? But apparently they did.
l All systems have security vulnerabilities and sometimes, while many people are more likely to attack a Windows system, it does not mean that Linux or Unix systems are automatically safe.
l Always, always backup, even if you are sure about your system.
On another token, fingerprint systems are really getting more popular. The other day, I was talking to a Japanese friend, who informed me that most cell phones now in Japan have built in fingerprint authentication. That’s cool! That means when your phone is stolen, the thief would not be able to use it (unless he cuts your finger too!).
When we get more advanced phones that have fingerprint authentication, there will be fewer stealing, because then the thief wouldn’t be able to use the unit or sell it. Or, it is stolen, the information store in the phone will be safe.
Yesterday morning, I talked to a partner, IBM/Lenovo, which demonstrated to me how fingerprinting authentication is used in notebook computers. Cool! No more remembering of passwords. Since one is not likely to lose a finger, the notebook can’t be stolen.
This system is also increasingly used in employee attendance monitoring in companies, but one of the coolest application I saw was actually in a prototype gun.
You know the problem with guns? You want to use it for self-defense, but it is also a weapon that can be used against you. There is also the problem of kids playing with or using it. So what about a gun that can has fingerprint authentication? Isn’t that cool?
If I own a gun like that, I will not fear that someone would use it against me.
I think this single security or safety feature will be a big help in preventing accidents and robbery.
For Bisaya stories from Cebu. Click here. (February 2, 2006 issue)
Write letter to the editor.Click here.
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