Day 9: All secure

Today's program started only in the afternoon. It consisted of a visit to the KL branch of F-Secure, a world-wide company specialised in malware detection and preventive security measures. I am not an expert in this area, but they seem to be one of the major global players in the field. They have a call center and customer care service here covering not just Malaysia but some of the surrounding region as well; but more importantly for our purpose, some of their R&D is also located here.

Secure door

Getting there was another case of time misjudgement: after having pulled the start time back from 12:45 to 12:20, we arrived more than an hour early at our destination. Light grumbling again. Nothing for it but to wander around among the local coffee and lunch places, a cut up here from most we have seen before; we were clearly in an affluent business district.

At F-secure, we were treated to a presentation which essentially amounted to a lecture about cybersecutiry that would do very well in any university course on the subject. It was delivered by a guy who called himself Calvin. We rarely get to learn names of the presenters, and when we do, they often call themselves by nicknames or anglicised versions of their name, to make life easier for the western tongue. I am not sure I would follow that line if our roles were reversed, names being such an important part of identity; but then, we tend to give more weight to identity than they do here.

The world is a grim place through the eyes of a malware specialist. Threats are everywhere, to every measure there is a countermeasure, no defense remains unbreached on the world wide web. Trojan horses, backdoors, worms and honeypots, spearphishing, ransomware and watering holes: all inventive, cute-sounding terminology for branches of cybercrime. The Internet of Things, presented by the propaganda machine of Singapore so lovingly as the solution to problems we never had in the first place, was now portrayed as a sleeping dragon of potentially disatrous proportions, already responsible for the most massive DDoS attack in history. Kind of scary, really; indeed, Calvin confessed to have developed a healthy degree of paranoia.

Waiting for the presentation to start

The thing is, there is so much money to be made to bring the next cool gadget to the market that developers simply do not take the time to program their new devices properly and make sure they are error-free and secure. I think that only a major disaster might bring it home to the general population that we really need better business practices. Even the almost weekly reports of hacked services (LinkedIn, Yahoo, revenue servies, banks) with sometimes hundreds of millions of stolen identities as a result haven't made a sufficient impact. Personally I believe that compulsory certification is the only way to go. We don't let unsafe electric devices onto the market; why do we accept insecure electronic ones?

Presenters (Calvin to the right)

I later overheard a student say that he thought it was all rather generic and we didn't hear much that was new or learn a lot about the company. I think that's only partially true: there were a lot of anecdotes from the point of view of F-secure, as well as recent trends and events. Moreover, in a nice change from many previous visits, there was a proper QA session afterwards where answers were provide quite frankly. (Unlike for instande at the UniMY, where a student clearly (and maybe predictably) found the question which course she liked best impossible to answer with so many of her teachers in the room. The message that Calvin stressed the most though was a very general one, namely: take care of your passwords. Use strong ones and renew them; don't rely on third-party identification services such as facebook and google since they endanger your privacy; and use a password manager if you can't keep track yourself. I'm using one of these myself nowadays and I can confirm it is very convenient, not least because it also makes me realise the number of different accounts I actually have, which starts to approach a hundred. (I'm sure that this number is not actually very impressive among computer science professionals.)

After the presentation we were led one floor up, to where the customer care service was located. Though it complemented the story well, in itself this was not so informative: people behind screens are a common sight. There was a screen on the wall with a world heat map of the latest detected incidents, on which Batu Caves was ranked rather high. There was opportunity for some more questions, but the situation with us standing around the tables and people working there was not very conducive to an extended session. So it was soon back to the bus and to the hotel.

Drift dining

This time there was an evening programme: dining with the Organising Committee and the two supervisors. Those two were by this time not the same as we had started out with: Luís has flown off on Tuesday morning, coincidentally also to Indonesia where the students are flying on Saturday, for a couple of university visits in his capacity of director of education for Business and IT. This afternoon his replacement had arrived, Rudy Oude Vrielink, a lecturer in that study programme. These two days I have had to do the hard job of keeping the students under control all by myself. A good thing I don't actually have that job, so the question whether I succeeded or failed does not have to be asked, let alone answered.

Malaysian Irish coffee

The OC had selected Drift Dining, a restaurant serving the most Western European-style cuisine I have seen here, before or after. While I'm writing this I realise that Naughty Nuris falls into the same category, but that place did not feel western despite offering an utter pork fest; here they really went for the elegant and expensive look and feel, with large wine glasses on the table and prices at least five times what we had been paying the night before. Good for variety, to be sure, and also quite well-prepared, but after two weeks I am not yet desperate for a taste of home and would have been happy to explore variety within the Asian cuisine. I am somewhat ashamed to admit that I would be at a loss to explain the differences between the dishes from Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, Laos, Myamar, Vietnam, Cambodia and India, all of which can be found here without looking hard. I omitted the Chinese and Japanese kitchen from this list because I like to think that those are different enough for me to notice, but it is more than likely I'm fooling myself even there, if only because there is no single definition of, say, "the" Chinese kitchen - how could there be, in a country as large as and more populated than all of Europe? In the Netherlands, one Chinese restaurant is much like the next (and very few of them are properly Chinese, most of the owners having originated from Indonesia, or so I have been told) but seen from here the diversity is much more visible.

Getting into the Helicopter pad: no shorts, no sandals!

So as not to leave Rudy with the idea that he had just had a typical taste of Malaysia, we relocated to the Helicopter Pad nearby. This place, which I had heard the students talk about, is as its name suggest an actual helicopter landing place on top of one of the large towers, but in the nighttime serves a second purpose as a bar. Though "only" 40 or so stories high, it offers great views over the much higher landmark towers of KL (in particular the mast-like KL tower and the connected twin Petronas towers). We had some trouble getting in because we were in our casual attire, whereas the bar wanted to admit only long trousers and shoes. After invoking the manager and claiming - truthfully - that friends of ours were already up there, they brought forth some fashionable overtrousers and temporary footwear that made us acceptable, and up we went on the remaining flights of stairs to enjoy the views and a few beers or cocktails.

Petronas towers as seen from the Helipad

KL tower as seen from the Helipad

With the mood thus mellowed, we made a final stop-over at a more regular ground-level bar, until the music was turned up too loud for conversation and it was hotel time once more, at least for me. Rudy kept up quite well, having had a good night's (or day's) sleep on the plane.