Afterword

ThimphuTech was the first technology blog in Bhutan. We started writing it in 2009, just as broadband and mobile internet started to take off. (Although internet in Bhutan was launched in 1999, it was either super-slow or super-expensive, and was only used by a selected few).

In the blog, we wrote about technology and food, but also about plenty of other stuff. The blog became popular and influential in Bhutan. A companion bi-weekly column -- Ask Boaz -- was published for many years in the Kuensel, Bhutan's national newspaper. (The complete Kuensel columns are available as an ebook, Blogging with Dragons).

We stopped updating the blog when we left Bhutan in 2014, but the information within the posts can still prove useful, and thus we decided to keep it online.

We thank all our readers.
Tashi Delek,
Boaz & Galit.

Monday, August 6, 2012

Hacking: Nuisance or Real Danger?

Blogger PaSsu wrote the following comment on our previous post, "RCSC, BoB, RGoB Portal among tens of hacked websites":
God, I love the hackers. This only shows how careless we are, including myself- though I am not the admin of my school website yet. I am seriously thinking about google sites as the secure future. Thanks for the information and cautioning the whole of Bhutan. I am very concerned about bob website being hacked. But with rest of the hacks, I think they are just having fun....
True. Most of these hacking jobs were not done by professionals and the hackers did not target any specific organization. These are mostly young people trying to get recognition by exploiting vulnerabilities in existing software packages, and they get attention by replacing existing content with scary messages.

However, the ease by which these hackers manage to tweak Bhutanese websites should serve as a red flag. It means that with a little effort, sophisticated hackers can cause substantial damage. In addition to the attack on BoB's website that PaSsu is concerned about, RCSC's Civil Service Information System, which was launched two years ago, was also hacked. One can only imagine the kind of havoc a hacker can create if they can gain access to the RCSC database and can then view, manipulate or delete information.

Everything's moving to cyberspace. It's time to take internet security seriously.

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