March 20th, 2006

On the road again

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I left Vietnam a couple of days ago .. I didnt stay for the whole event as it is really depressing. If we believe everything that is said, my PC is probably infected by a dozen of (undetectable) spywares with maybe a stealth ‘rootkit’ or two, part of being a botnet participating in DDoS against Ebay while sending paypal phishing spams right now. Some of the slides showing what these spywares and rootkit collect and send back are worrisome (they even able to latch up ssl encrypted https so bye bye credit card #s).

CNCERT alone, for example, reported 125,000 security incidents and found 300+ botnets. To put it into perspective, thats 350 security and 1 botnet incident per day! Now, that with 110M internet users of course but if we scale it to Singapore size, we should expect about 1000 security incidents and 1 botnet. I am most concerned with that 1 botnet which we never found…especially we know the # of botnet is directly related to the broadband pentration.

Anyway, I am now in Kuala Lumpur for a couple of meetings. I didnt stay at a fancy hotel this time (hey, I am on my own now!) so I have to hunt around for wireless hotspot. Luckily, that proof to be pretty easy as most building has two to three hotspot operaters: Airzad, Timedotcom and TM.net.

Sitting at a Starbuck in PJ, I noticed a lot others also have their notebook open. I could count 10 notebooks in this tiny Starbuck. This is quite unusual because I dont see that much of this Singapore (except maybe Holland Village starbuck where NUS students gathered). More importantly, Malaysia has a lower notebook pentration than Singapore….I wonder why….

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