Software Security for you

Your phone call-log reveals lot about you: Your Phone call-log is equally important as your emails, online accounts as it can reveal huge amount of information about you. What kind of person you are and what you do. What you work on and to whom you talk to frequently. Over the time it grows and maintains critical info about you, your relationships, your work, your friends, your business, your food orders and your health. Your phone call-log is not private any more: This info can be used in multiple ways to map your identity and people you communicate too.  And it's too easy to capture this info and send it across to third-party. You just have to install an app(e.g. games on android) that reads your call log and send it to third-party server; which happens behind the scene while you enjoy games. Thereon your call-log can be sold/shared/investigated and can become public information. Your call-log can provide sensitive info based on where you work. Companies provide BYOD (B

Facebook is now the social networking norm and everyone connecting to internet is on Facebook or soon will get on it. No big deal with having a Facebook account and actively using it daily. Kids start Facebook at 13 (officially) and will go till you are alive. It's going to capture all your life events and map it in its timeline. You are one of those Facebook users who share things, who over-share or under-share. But you do share! If you don’t then your friends share info about you by means of tagging. Ultimately there is info about you shared directly or indirectly. There is ton of info that can be shared and people do share it without a second thought. And this gets into Facebook permanently(even if you delete your account).  This info can then be used by public/friends and is no more private. Knowing that you will hold Facebook account for lifetime, it's important to review privacy settings and manage who can see your shared info. Here are the key privacy settings th

Apple announced bunch of privacy & security features in their 2014 WWDC keynote and one of them is randomizing MAC address. This alone is a great feature and would like to see this become industry standard. With iOS8 all Apple handheld devices will generate random MAC address while it scans for Wi-Fi network. Doing this protects your privacy by on the go as no one can track you uniquely at a given location. Read my other blog on Wi-Fi tracking to know more on how MAC address can be used to map your location. So what is MAC Address anyway?  MAC address is unique hardware address of your network device. These are unique within network to identify a device and route network traffic to correct device. It is a 6 byte long ID that maps your network device (iPhone, iPad, Android, Laptop, desktop,  TV, and all devices that connects to network) on network. This does not change and is set by device manufacturer. How is MAC address used ?  When your device does connect to any netw

Email is the here to stay for long time, though we have moved to chat, voice call, video /skype calls, twitter and Facebook messages. Good amount of information is communicated over emails and that is part of our daily routine. Many times we do need to send confidential information via email and we do share critical info using email. This info is then maintained on servers forever - one copy on your account and other on receivers account and can be read / sniffed by people who owns the servers/data. Also servers are backed up and they do ensure users emails are not lost in case of any failure. In practice your confidential info has many copies around the globe that can land up in anyone's hand. We all do use popular email services like, gmail/outlook/yahoo/etc. and they do provide secure login over HTTPS/SSL. Email you sent is encrypted from your computer to gmail (as example) server. This email is then forwarded to receivers email server in clear text(un-encrypted format) an