Content Tagged “security”
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Mikko’s SMP
Mikko Hyppönen, famed IT security researcher and longtime head of research at F-Secure, has been wearing an Omega Seamaster Professional original blue wave dial “Bond Watch” as a daily driver for 25 years now. His is a few years ahead of mine and the full-size version, and he’s rocking the original bracelet, but he’s basically my brother-in-watch. And, unsurprisingly, the man who coined Hyppönen's Law of IoT Security (“whenever an appliance is described as being ‘smart’, it is vulnerable”) likes his mechanical watch for the same reason I like mine, too:
I’ve been carrying the same watch for 25 years. It’s an Omega Seamaster Professional. This is not a smartwatch. No wifi, no bluetooth, no chipset. Can’t be hacked.
Mikko Hyppönen’s Omega Seamaster Professional (Photo: Mikko Hyppönen)
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The Horrible Cambodian Scam Industry
Cambodia within South East Asia (Mapping by Mapbox)Ever wondered where all that spam comes from? Man, this is bad.
→ Reuters: Amnesty says Cambodia is enabling brutal scam industry
Human rights group Amnesty International accused Cambodia’s government on Thursday of “deliberately ignoring” abuses by cybercrime gangs that have trafficked people from across the world, including children, into slavery at brutal scam compounds. The London-based group said in a report that it had identified 53 scam centres and dozens more suspected sites across the country, including the Southeast Asian nation's capital, Phnom Penh.
The prison-like compounds were ringed by high fences with razor wire, guarded by armed men and staffed by trafficking victims forced to defraud people across the globe, it said, with those inside subjected to punishments including shocks from electric batons, confinement in dark rooms, and beatings. Amnesty said its findings revealed a "pattern of state failures" that allowed the billion-dollar industry to flourish, including failures to investigate human rights abuses, identify and assist victims, and regulate security companies and tools of torture.
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What I’ve Been Up To
You’ve probably noticed that there hasn’t been much going on here lately. This is mostly because I’ve been working very hard behind the scenes to bring the website up to version 3.0, which includes a visual refresh for the site’s theme. I’ve also spent a week on the road, hosting a stage at the secIT 2025 conference as well as doing a lot of networking and sourcing for stories around the event.
I then promptly got the obligatory conference flu, which laid me out for about a week. I completely lost my voice for a few days and was also very tired, the combination of which prevented me from getting any work done. So naturally, there is now quite a backlog to get through.
The work on the new website version is still ongoing behind the scenes. This refresh is made up of three new colour schemes that took me a few weeks to nail down. There are also new features which had to be implemented and tested properly. That’s all finished now. But there is still a lot of work to be done, because I’ve had to touch every single piece of content on the site to change some code that has to do with a new, improved categorisation scheme that’s part of the new design. It’s a lot of work, but will be well worth it in the end. I hope I’ll have that completed soon, so that everyone gets to see the new version of the site that I’ve been working on. Until then, hang tight.
