A young man knocked on my home gate very early morning. As a security measure, I do not open for strangers. Call me a coward, but the nature of my work requires me to be alert. I checked in the camera and saw a man in his mid-20s. I went outside the house but inside the fence and shouted over the fence: “How May I help you, I asked.” “I want to be your security guard”, he replied. “What makes you think I don’t have a guard”, concerned I probed. “I am talking to you directly”, he fired back. “Well,…
10 reasons for a career in cybersecurity and forensics
9th: Endless opportunities I got my first job at a time I was pursuing an accountancy qualification. My job performance indicators were a number of manual forms scanned. Once upon a time, banks kept manual banking system. All client information was kept in a manual file folder, including deposits and withdrawals. It was not easy to do reconciliations or facilitate the first turnaround. Banks would be congested and service too slow. The scale of fraud loss of records and impersonation was high. The technology was the solution. I joined a bank when it was converting all clients manual records into…
The state of cybersecurity in Uganda
A discussion with Mustapha B. Mugisa, of mustaphabm3.sg-host.com. 1. How safe are businesses/individuals online? Starting with businesses, their safety is guaranteed if and only if they are engaged and actively assessing and probing their infrastructure and systems for vulnerabilities in small time frames like once every 4 to 6 months due to the dynamic element of discovered vulnerabilities and bugs in systems and software. Most of the leaders may not be paying attention to cyber security at all. When it comes to physical security, leaders are paying attention and you can see that in the presence of security guards, bio-metric…
Cybersecurity basics for law firms
The legal profession is built on the foundation of security (confidentiality, integrity and availability) of client secrets. You are right to say all professionals have a responsibility to keep their client’s secrets secret. How can a lawyer in Uganda with a team of paralegals and other likeminded staff each with a laptop / computer interconnected on the same network keep customers’ secrets on their computers secret? Put yourself in the shoes of a typical client of a law firm. You are a manager. You work in a department with other professionals. On 16th May 2017, you were asked to travel…
Cyber security facts and fiction: part 3
Issue: A new ransom-ware, Locky, is up and about, crawling the Internet for the next prey. It is brilliant. It’s persistent. And it won’t go without taking some of your money. Locky virus encrypts your computer files (rendering them unreadable). It then demands a ransom from you [the victim] to your files back. OR to get the decryption key. Fact: The attack vector is simple and the usual approach: If you are a target, you will receive an email with a subject line that goes like: “ATTN: Invoice J-98223146”. A word document is attached. Sometimes the file is a .zip…