Tag Archive for: digital

Vietnam’s ‘white hat’ hackers secure prestigious digital security award

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Last month, Viettel Cyber Security (VCS), a unit of Viettel, one of Vietnam’s largest state-owned enterprises, received thrilling news: they emerged as champions in the esteemed cybersecurity competition Pwn2Own Toronto 2023.

At the close of the competition on the evening of October 27, Viettel’s VCS team clinched the championship with an impressive total score of 30 points, earning them the distinguished title of ‘Master of Pwn’ and outpacing competitors by a significant margin of 12.75 points.

The total score was calculated based on successful participation and assigned Master of Pwn points in the competition’s category tables.

Pwn2Own 2023 was hosted by Toronto, Canada from October 24 to 27.

A team of young achievers

The sweet taste of success embraced the 14 young members of the team after three months of relentless dedication, working day and night, and competing fiercely against rivals worldwide.

Perhaps surprising to many, the youngest member, Do Anh Dung, a third-year student from the University of Engineering and Technology under the Vietnam National University-Hanoi, was born in 2003.

Beyond the youthfulness of Dung, the other 13 members of VCS, who achieved significant success at Pwn2Own 2023, are also young. 

Despite their tender age, each team member boasts considerable experience in cybersecurity, cultivated over years of dedicated work.

Even the youngest, Dung, made a noteworthy contribution, securing a victory in one of the competition categories, aiding in the team’s triumph.

On the evening of October 27, VCS secured the final victory, surpassing formidable opponents such as Sea Security from Singapore, Vupen and Synacktiv from France, and last year’s winners Devcore from Taiwan.

Ha Anh Hoang, a VCS team member, told Tuoi Tre (Youth) newspaper that they were informed about the devices they had to compromise only three months before the contest’s opening day.

This meant a tight preparation schedule, including purchasing new devices, exploring their hardware and software, and awaiting the arrival of some tools ordered from abroad, which took up to a month.

Nguyen Xuan Hoang, another team member, acknowledged the presence of…

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Digital Avengers: Five Unifying Factors Shaping the Battle Against Global Cybercrime

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As cyber threats evolve, our most potent weapon is collective action. Governments, industries, and international partners must join forces against digital adversaries to proactively navigate this dynamic cybersecurity realm.

There are five key factors shaping the ongoing battle against cybercrime. Together, they outline a shared framework for collective defense, drawing inspiration from the National Cybersecurity Strategy’s goals and integrating best practices and lessons learned from Microsoft’s Digital Crimes Unit (DCU). By uniting the efforts of law enforcement, security firms, researchers, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and individuals, we can enable better transparency and information exchange against unprecedented cyber threats. 

Factor One: United in Threat Intelligence 

Shared threat intelligence is the bedrock of a robust cyber defense strategy. This requires information sharing, continuous vigilance in tracking adversarial activities, revealing undisclosed threat actors, and ensuring unwavering protection for on-premise servers. 

Microsoft aims to play a central role in this collective endeavor by fostering deep relationships with our customers and their security teams. Since 2008, Microsoft’s DCU has been at the forefront of battling cybercrime, including timely victim remediation, regularly publishing security intelligence reports, and engaging in various threat information-sharing platforms. These efforts serve to empower organizations, security professionals, and the broader community to stay informed, well-protected, and ahead of the ever-evolving landscape of cyber threats.

Take the collective support of Ukraine against the cyber war launched by Russia. Industry leaders collaborated with Ukrainian government agencies and their security teams to offer technical assistance, threat intelligence, and cybersecurity resources that provided timely insight into threat actors and their tactics — enhancing the nation’s cyber defenses. Efforts like these showcase the growing need to share threat intelligence at speed and scale for better cyber security. 

Factor Two: United in Innovation

New technologies are transforming cybersecurity by enhancing threat detection…

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The Emergence Of Smart Cities In The Digital Era

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Realizing the potential of Smart Cities will require public-private cooperation and security by design.

The idea of smart cities is starting to take shape as the digital era develops. A city that has developed a public-private infrastructure to support waste management, energy, transportation, water resources, smart building technology, sustainability, security operations and citizen services is referred to as a “smart city”. Realizing the potential of Smart Cities will require public-private cooperation and security by design.

A smart city functions as an applied innovation lab. Automation, robotics, enabling nanotechnologies, artificial intelligence (human/computer interface), printed electronics and photovoltaics, wearables (flexible electronics), and information technologies like real-time and predictive analytics, super-computing, 5G wireless networks, secure cloud computing, mobile devices, and virtualization are a few of the fascinating technological trends of the digital era that are influencing the development of smart cities.

Cities have become “smarter” overall as a result of the shift from analog to digital technologies in recent years. Such cooperation entails facilitating coordinated operational actions. It includes exchanging situational awareness as well.

Smart cities save costs and resource consumption, increase public participation, and improve the effectiveness and efficiency of municipal services through the use of digital technology for information and communication. These types of digital technologies are utilized by smart cities to facilitate information and communication, reduce expenses and resource consumption, enhance public participation, and improve the efficacy and efficiency of municipal services.

Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) are already impacting the design and operations of Smart Cities. One of the areas that AI and ML can support is facilitating architectural designs and building for optimum ergonomics and performance. Also, AI and ML can facilitate Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR) products by integrating orchestration processes, automation,…

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Apple and Google have made phones the key to your digital life. Here’s what to do if you lose it.

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The night before I was supposed to go on a long and well-deserved vacation, something very, very bad happened: I lost my phone. I had a friend over and, I decided, he must have accidentally taken my phone with him when he left. Which was a problem because all methods I had to contact him — including his phone number and address — were in the one thing I now didn’t have.

There’s nothing like spending 30 minutes panicking that you’ve lost your phone to make you realize just how devastating that loss can be … and how poorly you’ve prepared for the possibility. Access to just about everything I wasn’t already logged into on my computer was dependent on access to my phone, with my mobile-device-only password manager and multifactor authentication apps and text messages. Actually, had I even backed my phone up to my iCloud account? Didn’t I delete my backups to free up storage space? Was I logged into iCloud on my laptop? Would it even be possible to log in, since my passwords and authentication tools were only on the phone?

“I don’t think most people prepare for losing their phone,” Sherrod DeGrippo, director of threat intelligence strategy at Microsoft, told Vox. “Which is surprising considering how many people [have] lost their phone, broke their device, or had it stolen. Despite many people having experience here, they aren’t often taking the right precautions.”

Our phones have become our main — in some cases, only — gateway to so many things. If you lock yourself out of your house, you can call a locksmith to get back in, even if it’s the middle of the night on a holiday. But if you lose your phone, you may lose your keys to a whole lot more, and it may take a while, if ever, to get that access back.

Ironically, this is especially true if you’ve proactively taken the kind of basic digital security measures most experts would recommend. My efforts to secure my accounts from bad actors — some of which relied on having my phone — might have made it that much harder for me to get back into them.

That’s not to say that you shouldn’t do those things — you absolutely should. You just want to make sure you’re preparing for the…

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