Last year I updated my PGP public encryption key to 4096 bits since it now looks as though it may be possible to crack a 1024 bit key within my lifetime.  Not that I have many secretes, but those that I do, I intend to keep out of prying eyes.  And unless quantum computers start to enter […]

After many years of work with clients across Africa and the Middle East I decided to join a large research organization, more specifically, Huawei’s European Research Center (ERC) headquartered in Munich. I figured that researching security and digging deeper into the cloud would not only give me a chance to put my field experience to […]

What is it about professional certifications that compels people to get certified in the technologies they work in or fields they want to get into? As many of us know, a certification doesn’t necessarily translate into someone’s mastery of topic. For a long time I resisted obtaining them because of too many disappointing experiences with […]

Multi-billion dollar Oil & Gas companies are being targeted by a new generation of intelligent and destructive computer viruses that are capable of collecting sensitive information and are capable of destroying entire computer ecosystems. On August 15, Saudi Aramco, the world’s largest Oil & Gas producer based in Saudi Arabia, admitted that it was targeted […]

Social media sites are increasingly finding themselves under the microscopes of privacy advocacy groups who criticize ever-growing data warehouses on global citizens. But as the social craze spills into the corporate ecosystem, individuals aren’t the only ones who should be concerned about what the likes of Facebook are planning on doing with all this information. It’s […]

New digital snooping laws being discussed in the U.K. and U.S. are generating a lot of negative sentiment from advocates of privacy and human rights groups. The new surveillance laws would allow service and platform providers to collect, store and even sell data to third parties and permit its perusal by various security services. In […]

For those of us who live in the Middle East, Internet censorship and partial access to services is a daily reality. The UAE’s two primary Internet Service Providers (ISPs), Du & Etisalat, actively monitor and filter access to Internet sites and content that the government deems inappropriate. But censorship of the Internet is only part […]

No matter how ridiculous the airport security checkpoints may appear, the rest of the world has nothing on the experience one gets in the US. I completely support bag x-ray machines, metal detectors, the explosive residue and contraband swab, the customs sniffer dogs and even annoying questioning, but I draw the line when common sense […]