ironcove.net

While we here at Ironcove.net are big fans of Linux on the desktop, we are also aware that it can be a scary proposition for those who have used Microsoft products for years. Running an alternative browser on your Windows platform is often a first step towards greater security against malware and getting away from the control that Microsoft exerts through its dominance. Opera have an alternative browser ...

Over the past two months there has been a significant increase in targeted malware and other attacks against the Tibetan Community and its supporters. Ironcove.net has put together a paper that covers the various attacks and looks into the possibility and extent of Chinese Government involvement in those attacks. We have also highlighted the fact that many of these attacks would be ineffective against an Ubuntu Desktop operating ...

Our friends over at HackerTarget.com have recently started offering free Nessus Vulnerability Scanning to non-profit organisations. Nessus is the worlds leading vulnerability scanning solution. It is a tool that scans an IP address for vulnerabilities so that they can then be acted upon and fixed. In some ways it is a simulated hacker attack against your server - so that when you do get scanned by hackers, your ...

The Register has a summary of more targeted malware attacks against the Tibetan Community and Supporters. The attack involves an email that when the flash movie is viewed it will install a keylogger on the computer. The keylogger will then record all keystrokes on the computer and send the details to a server in China. Now I am not going to point fingers and I would like to do ...

China is still in the news with Cyber Attacks making headlines. Political hacking by government and non-government organisations seems to becoming a hot topic. Politically motivated external attacks have been rife in the past few weeks. Members of the Save Darfur coalition told the Washington Post last week that their server had been attacked by hackers traced to computers in China. And several pro-Tibet groups reported receiving email viruses ­ although ...

Over the past few days there have been a number of reports in the mainstream media about targetted Information Warfare attacks against the Tibetan NGO community. These attacks are attempts by a third party (I wonder who that could be) to send malicious emails to various members of these communites. If these attacks succeed then the victim's computer could end up with Keyloggers and other trojans that would ...

Peru are implementing One Laptop Per Child program that will distribute laptops to 260'000 school children. A pilot project involved 50 laptops being sent to a remote village. Read the article for a fascinating and surprising look into the results. I wanted to know what the laptops had done for the kids. I told them I’m not a reporter, I don’t answer to the Ministry, and — an important ...

Due to restrictions with access to the internet in Cuba based around cost and control, the younger generation are passing around memory sticks containing the media they crave. An interesting article from the NYTimes. HAVANA — A growing underground network of young people armed with computer memory sticks, digital cameras and clandestine Internet hookups has been mounting some challenges to the Cuban government in recent months, spreading news that ...

While not strictly computer security awareness I couldn't go past mentioning these excellent Bicycle Africa projects. Unsure of the licensing on some of these like the Bamboo bicycle lets hope its creative commons or open source. A number of excellent projects are worth a look at in Africa. These projects aim to provide low cost bicycles for transport of people and cargo. Bamboo Bicycle Project Rawanda.org Kona Bike Town

The excellent TrueCrypt open source encryption utility has just been released in a version 5.0. The new version allows amoung other things full disk encryption. So that you must enter a secure password on boot of the system to access the fully encrypted partition. This adds an excellent layer of security to all systems but particularily laptops. When governments and corporations seem to lose so many laptops that ...