Locked Shields 2019

Another year, new challenges

As every year, I took part in the Locked Shields cyber exercise. This year the team responsible for Red Team detection doubled in size — whether that doubled our chances of eliminating the Red Team (attackers) was hard to judge in advance.

We spent the preparation...

12th Apr 2019

DPMBfree

The DPMB WiFi trial period is coming to an end

Since 1 February 2019 passengers have been able to connect to DPMBfree WiFi on trams. It's a trial run offering 4 MB per connection with a maximum session of 20 minutes. Connection speed: 256 kbps. Welcome back to the year 2000!

Now to be a bit...

22nd Mar 2019

This is my final warning

When someone threatens you…

I got an email:

FINAL WARNING ondrej@ondrejsramek.cz!

You have the last chance to save your social life - I am not kidding!!

I give you the last 72 hours to make the payment before I send the video with your masturbation to all your friends and associates.
The last...
11th Mar 2019

Apple Pay

The Czech Republic finally gets it too...

I was quite looking forward to 19 February — I was curious how it would work. I didn't hang around and waited in the morning to see what would happen. By some magic the option appeared in Wallet to add a payment card. I pointed it at my Mastercard and...

19th Feb 2019

500px Hacked?

I didn't get an email… I found out from 500px's official Twitter account

1/2 PLEASE NOTE: We recently learned of a potential security issue and have taken every precaution to ensure our users' data is safe. There is no indication of unauthorized account access, but as a precautionary measure, we a...
13th Feb 2019

Black Boxes

Meant to protect us...

The preamble of the draft bill reads:

The purpose of this draft bill is to grant Military Intelligence a new remit consisting of ensuring the cyber defence of the Czech Republic. For this purpose, the amendment to the Military Intelligence Act will allow it to use technica...

11th Feb 2019

Kompromitace webu

I got an email...

It said the following,

Dear support portal user,

as you may have noticed, our portal has been unavailable. We identified an unknown party's attempt to breach the Flowmon's support portal yesterday. As a part of the internal security process, we took the portal offline.

Whil...

1st Feb 2019

Filing a Tax Return Online

It's not exactly comfortable, but it works!

Circumstances forced my hand — I have to file my own tax return for last year. Because I have a Data Box, I must do it electronically. Filing a tax return isn't particularly complicated: add up a few numbers, put them in the right boxes, done.

What...

29th Jan 2019