Jamtraxx Web Solutions

At a conference held in Nevada, a Project Manager at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agancy otherwise known as DARPA asked hackers to to help block cyber threats in the United States.

Peiter Zatko announced the start of a fund-the-hackers program, called Cyber Fast Track, in a keynote talk at the Black Hat conference which is aimed at hackers and IT Sec experts.

"One of the ways I see fixing it is bridging the gap between the government and the hacker community," said Zatko, who goes by the handle "Mudge."

By "hacker," he doesn't mean criminal. He's referring to people who try to break computer systems with the goal of making them more secure. These people are sometimes referred to in the security industry as "white hats," as opposed to nefarious "black hats."

"We have all sorts of other criminals, be it in politics or finance, and those elements may be bigger than the criminal element in the hacker community," he said.

This would be the type of action I am hoping the Philippine Government would actually do. The past few months have been a rollercoaster ride for our ITSec Experts. Friday before President Aquino's State of the Nation Address, a government website was hacked and left a note. And few days before the said attack, a number of defaced government website have also been popping out. We are lucky that the crackers/hackers here in the Philippines are more of the White Hats. If they really wanted to do damage, they could have. 

I am guessing most or some of the System Administrators of the said government agencies have since been sacked or yelled at. Well, RootCon is due in a few days. These Systems Admins should attend conferences such as RootCon which discusses security issues and could actually help their networks.

It has been always a problem in the technology driven world we are now living in that all the stuff we need and access are on the cloud. Years ago, sending mails (snail mail for that matter), checking your bank account and even shopping needs the person to be physically there. This technology from the birth of the web, Amazon, Ebay, Facebook and what not sure did give us humans a better 'life' however, the same technology caused significant problems to us as well.

Let's face it, there would always

 be flaws in the web, from hackers getting into other people's databases, identity theft and what not and the only barrier protecting our data on the web, is our passwords. A lot of people uses the same password on all the websites that we are a member of. Not to mention, most people still uses dictionary passwords(or passwords that can be found on a dictionary -.-), some people uses birthdays and a combination of the two.

This is really problimatic as this can be easily bruteforced(the process of guessing passwords). The problem that people usually have though is memorizing passwords that is of Industry Staandards is it is hard to memorize them- Yes, I know how that feels, I myself have more than 30 sites I go to and have different passwords on them all. We have stumbled upon a website that advocates itself to having a much better password. 

Passwordcard.org is a nice service to help people generate a new secure passwords for all different sites.