Google “productivity books” and it gives a handful list of books. As an avid productivity explorer, I read a good amount of them, and most of them definitely deliver useful messages to the audience. If I have to pick 3 books that most people can apply to their daily work and lives, it narrows down the following 3 books that have practical methods and approaches to tackle our personal and work lives. Please keep in mind that these books are not labeled as the BEST productivity books. I considered them as a decent practical knowledge shared by authors, built on their own personal experienc...

In 2023, we are witnessing a fast-growing market of value-added services on top of AI models, thanks in part to the availability of OpenAI’s ChatGPT to the public. With so many services available, it can be difficult to determine which ones are worth your time and effort. In this post, I’ll share some free services that you can use to improve your productivity and workflow. Please note that while these services don’t involve any monetary cost, you should be aware of the data privacy policies and terms and conditions of the developers. Due to the popularity of ChatGPT (powered by GPT-n foun...

Connected Leadership to Systems Thinking At the time of writing this, I am taking a Coursea course on Connected Leadership that explores how to make changes from the individual, team, and system levels. It’s a recommended course for anyone who wants to improve their systematic thinking and learn how to think better. Section 3 of the course is about systems thinking, and I am trying to understand how to apply these thinking approaches to daily life. The blog post from Ryan Delaney called Systems Thinking Examples In Everyday Life gave me some ideas on how to apply it to my career in the cy...

I am avid enthusiast of productivity hack and wrote a few pieces over the past years on my productivity system and how to connect the digital apps that I used in a daily basis. This past few weeks, I discovered an approach that have been talking over productivity hack YouTuber and creators about building a backup or 2nd brain and the implementation of it. This post is to highlight my findings and practical tips that might help you in your system. 2nd brain aka Backup brain I stumbled upon a productivity YouTube clip and recalled the idea from GRIP by Rick Pastoor called backup brain. Tia...

A Recap on ChatGPT and Alternatives Currently, there are numerous ChatGPT and alternative NLP-based technologies available, such as Anthropic, GPT-3, and WebGPT. The list of more than 600 apps can be found at gpt3demo, and it continues to grow. A few I personally used are Poe by Quora, Perplexity, AI21 Labs and Flowrite. I wrote this piece in a way of exploring how this NLP technology can assist in daily workflows for cybersecurity practitioners. Prompts? I do not maintain like prompt library for tasks but if you are interested and looking for ideas, FlowGPT and Awesome-ChatGPT-Prompts i...

What is DNS Over HTTPs (DoH)? Standard DNS (on tcp/udp port 53) works just fine but missing security features to prevent tampering of its plaintext DNS request to the DNS providers. It leads to security issues such as DNS Cache Poisoning and typo-squatting domains. DNS Over HTTPs (DoH) brings TLS/SSL encapsulation on HTTP traffic to boost security integrity issues of spoofing and tampering of DNS requests from clients to providers. In this article, i will refer DNS Over HTTPs as DoH abbreviation. The Good This brings better security for personal home network to prevent DNS based attacks...

As a threat intel lead and riding all sort of new incidents in the past year, there is a change of attack vectors from adversary and cyber-criminals. The focus changes to human factors than complicated technical exploits which is a challenge for organizations to control. The purpose of this piece is to provide 8 highlights of what the individuals can focus to improve security hygiene and footprints on the internet. MFA Everything 2022 is full of incidents pivoting around MFA bypass and social engineering attempts towards MFA token to breach into the system. Still, this is still a layer o...

A recent report from Group-IB describes that Russian hackers have stolen over 50 millions passwords in the first 7 months of 2022 using info stealer malware. The evolution and development of Information Stealer Malware in 2022 is intrusive and there are many variants of infoStealer malware targeting from mobile to desktop operating systems. This is still a prominent threat in upcoming years and this post is a study of infoStealer malware capability and common observed characteristics for remediation and awareness of it. What is Information Stealer Malware? The goal of InfoStealer malwar...

From a super user comes from Windows 95 to 10 and a variety of Linux Window manager from GUI to tiling Window Manager, I put myself as slightly above average level in terms of understanding in desktop window organization. When I started using MacOS 3 years ago, my frustration with a dozen of floating apps and almost impossible to point out a particular app I am looking for is a bummer. Window 10 introduces multiple desktops, which is awesome way to organize desktop by logical grouping. My first desktop will be browser, 2nd desktop will be apps related with work (email, one note, MS Teams) ...

On a good Sunday morning, I was flipping my kindle to read a book related with my job. I went to Amazon store to check books under Threat Intel & Hunting domains. There is not a lot of options as other Cybersecurity domains, especially in the ones published recent years. I got a wild idea of buying a bunch of them to read through to review the content of the books and the ideas. This is a brief review of these books for anyone who wants to purchase to read it. My main job responsibility is taking care of threat landscape and input to risk management. The reviews are given to reflect whi...