CEH Certified Ethical Hacker: Training Without Ethics?

I just received "great news" from an attendee of a local training of CEH or Certified Ethical Hacker held somewhere in Metro Manila. The attendee came from a local bank and came right to us that he tried to crack our website's security

It came to a surprise to me that their instructor in the "certification" training made them nominate a website for them to hack and test their newly-acquired skills. The attendee gladly told us he wasn't able to penetrate our website and so congratulated us, including me being the information security officer, for such a job well done.

I'm not going to discuss it fully and didn't rebut the attendee but there really is something wrong here.

What the certified ethical hacker instructor did was actually ethical. He ordered his students to attempt to hack websites without the website owners' written approval. Something penetration testing professionals and vulnerability assessment consultants have prior to the engagement.

CEH-EC should check him out. Gaining the basic skills to conduct security assessments is very easy even by just browsing the Internet, but who will certify hackers as ethical when the instructor himself is urging his students to let loose their new-found skills?

There is only thing that separates white hat hackers from black hats from one another despite having the same set of skills: Permission!

Poking around systems without permission is unethical and downright illegal!

GMA Codename Asero and Information Security

I happen to always catch the showing of GMA Kapuso's Codename Asero by the time I get home at around dinner time. Not that I follow the show but since people at home are Kapuso fanantics

I was able to catch the initial showing of the science fiction series on tv, some sort of Alias meets Universal Soldier, but noticed too many glaring shortcomings typical of Filipino writers just to get a storyline going.

There is a scene there that the two protagonist agencies, Advocate and Empire, doesn't practice the age-old principle of "Know Thy Enemy and know thyself" by not actually having a dossier on their employees. Stupid leaders of the agencies don't know the parents of Asero while Empire guys have a stupid policy of not knowing anything about their employees' family.

Spare me the crap. No top secret company can operate under wraps for so long without the principle of "know thy employees."

All over the place, you get things and bags and stuff marked with Empire and Advocate, a practice not done by real top secret companies, not even the agencies of the hit TV series Alias.

There's also a stupid way to check if Agent Asero is really a cyborg when they let him get near an octopus-like gizmo to detect is he's really a cyborg. Good thing Empire guys encrypted the signal.

C'mon, a simple metal detector or x-ray machine can do the trick.

One more thing, the Empire knows where the Advocate holds office and yet they don't know the employees and stuff.

Stop pulling my leg with such glaring boob tube booboos.

Filipino writers and directors should break away from stupid plots in order to be really world-class, less of the melodrama, and more attune to reality, something like the producers of sci-fi series and films like Alias, who seem to be in touch with the real world. Foreign sci-fi series don't resort to cheap gimmicks and perhaps employ consultants on technical stuff to be at least acceptable.

Or does it really mean that Filipino audiences are too...never mind the word!

iPhone 3G Impressions and Camera Sample Pictures

I now have a fresh out of the box iPhone 3G from Apple, the envy of my officemates due to the slick new interface but i noticed immediately several negatives on the iconic mobile device.

1. you can't foward text messages/SMS to others...quite a standard with other phones. will have to check for workarounds.
2. GPS functionality doesn't work as advertised. I will have to buy a separate GPS device, probably Garmin, for this to be installed on my car's dashboard.
3. Camera, as I expected, performs below my expectations. I'm partial to the image quality of Sony-Ericsson phones. See sample pictures taken at Tiendesitas in Pasig.

Will update this post for more observations and the dark side of the iPhone 3G.

Poisoned DNS Servers Redirecting My Website to AsianMultiAdvertising.Com

For the last two days, I experienced about a 30% drop in taffic to my main blog, Backpacking Philippines,. I thought it was normal until I received an email from PBS yahoogroup (one of whom seems to be working at Dell Computers traced from the IP address) asking me to check my blog since it's redirecting somewhere else.

I checked first my own blog and concluded there's nothing wrong with my blog and probably the DNS servers used by the people complaining is that the DNS server they're using are poisoned, with the recently made public critical DNS flaw still unpatched by lazy and/or clueless systems administrators.

I suspected this to be the problem also with the recent problem of SmartBro.

To check if your DNS is the culprit, change the settings of your DNS to point to OpenDNS then re-visit my blog. If it correct the problem, contact your ISP or network administrator to immediately update the DNS software their using.