| Jibran Ilyas 的个人资料Jibran's Blog照片日志列表 |  工具  帮助 |
|
Jibran's BlogTake the road less traveled, if you know what i mean :) 2008/12/12 So this is how it feels ...So I wrote a paper after discovering this new technique hackers are using to steal credit card data. To see it as a security alert out on the web and the feeling that it may have prevented security breaches gives me immense pleasure. I remember writing about the joys of working as a Forensic Consultant in my last blog entry ... well, it's twice as much now. Although, I wrote this paper in a couple of days, it took about two months to get this paper published. It was quite an interesting process to say the least and a great learning experience altogether. A lot of people contributed to this paper and I am extremely happy to get an opportunity to thank them ...
Many thanks to Colin Sheppard for encouraging me to write the paper; also for making the edits to my geeky analysis and giving it a professional look Thanks to Jacob Carlson for helping me with the malware analysis Thanks to Sam Bakken from our marketing department to further enhance the paper Thanks to Ingrid Beierly from Visa for asking critical questions about the paper, which made the paper even better
Here are a few lines from the security alert issued by Visa:
"To promote the security and integrity of the payment system, Visa is committed to helping clients and payment system participants better understand their responsibilities related to securing cardholder data. As part of this commitment, Visa issues Data Security Alerts when emerging vulnerabilities are identified in the marketplace, or as a reminder about best practices.
The full security alert is available at http://usa.visa.com/download/merchants/debugging_software_memory.pdf
2008/8/26 What's up? Hello there ... Its been about a year since I wrote an original post on this blog. Time has literally flown. In totality, the year has been very fulfilling. Working as a Forensics Consultant has been no less than an absolute thrilling experience. Discovering hacking techniques is quite fascinating even more than the excitement of visiting new places for investigations. The cutest discovery is that hackers are humans too. Anyway, I will pay proper tribute to my job some other time. Right now a huge thank you to family and friends who cope with me and wish the best for me. I am not sure if I will get to say it on their face so I am glad I get to do it on my (thankfully) unpopular blog. To sum it all, a successful year ; also an eye-opening year where I got to understand negative human emotions. Humans are very complicated entity and there are lots of variables in life which trigger our behaviour. A particular combination of variables is enough to bring out either the best or worst in us. The question is what to do when the combination hits you. I am not sure suppressing emotions and taking a high road is the best solution but when the alternative is to look bad when you know you are gonna look bad, you are automatically between a hard place n a rock. Keeping it in makes you bitter, so taking it out of the system actually does YOU a favor. There is a saying k "Jab time bura chal raha hota hai tou ooont par bethey insaan ko bhi kutta kaat sakta hai" Translation: When time is not in your favor, you can get bitten by a dog even when you are sitting on top of a camel :) What else is up? Oh ya, I am half way done with my Masters at Northwestern and I am really looking forward to go back to school in a month. I remember last year at this time, I had just been back from Pakistan and was wondering how life would be at NU. It took some time to adjust , but no complaints there. I am living the dream of going to NU, I can't ask for more. Well, its 2:47am and I got work tomorrow so I am gonna sign off for today after giving a huge thank you to all my friends and loved ones who give me thousands of reasons to cheer and laugh. Thank You for being in my life! I mentioned Pakistan trip last summer so there were a couple of songs that were quite popular at the time. Dedicating this to my childhood friends Mohsin and Danish. A lot of memories of sitting in their cars and listening to these records over and over. 1) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xhV8dN4cebA 2) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IQ09x8ab_C4 Last and in that order, my song for this post --- Keh do jo bhi man mein aaye See ya, Jibran p.s. this post was titled "When you give your best, rest in peace" and the plan was to be semi preachy and all ... i donno where that thought went... no regrets however :) 2008/1/19 Never underestimate the power of your actions Before I go ahead with this post, let me just mention that this is a fictional story I have read many a times. Today I came across it while surfing a forum so I couldn't resist .... here it is for the ones who haven't come across this very touchy and inspirational story... Enjoy :) ---------------------- One day, when I was a freshman in high school, I saw a kid from my class was walking home from school. His name was Kyle. It looked like he was carrying all of his books. I thought to myself, "Why would anyone bring home all his books on a Friday? He must really be a nerd." I had quite a weekend planned (parties and a football game with my friends tomorrow afternoon), so I shrugged my shoulders and went on. As I was walking, I saw a bunch of kids running toward him. They ran at him, knocking all his books out of his arms and tripping him so he landed in the dirt. His glasses went flying, and I saw them land in the grass about ten feet from him He looked up and I saw this terrible sadness in his eyes My heart went out to him. So, I jogged over to him as he crawled around looking for his glasses, and I saw a tear in his eye. As I handed him his glasses, I said, "Those guys are jerks. They really should get lives." "He looked at me and said, "Hey thanks!" There was a big smile on his face. It was one of those smiles that showed real gratitude. I helped him pick up his books, and asked him where he lived. As it turned out, he lived near me, so I asked him why I had never seen him before. He said he ha d gone to private school before now. I would have never hung out with a private school kid before. We talked all the way home, and I carried some of his books. He turned out to be a pretty cool kid. I asked him if he wanted to play a little football with my friends He said yes. We hung out all weekend and the more I got to know Kyle, the more I liked him, and my friends thought the same of him. Monday morning came, and there was Kyle with the huge stack of books again. I stopped him and said, "Boy, you are gonna really build some serious muscles with this pile of books everyday!" He just laughed and handed me half the books. Over the next four years, Kyle and I became best friends. I teased him all the time about being a nerd. When we were seniors we began to think about college. Kyle decided on Georgetown and I was going to Duke. I knew that we would always be friends, that the miles would never be a problem. He was going to be a doctor and I was going for business on a football scholarship. Kyle was valedictorian of our class. He had to prepare a speech for graduation. I was so glad it wasn't me having to get up there and speak Graduation day, I saw Kyle. He looked great. He was one of those guys that really found himself during high school. He filled out and actually looked good in glasses. He had more dates than I had and all the girls loved him. Boy, sometimes I was jealous! Today was one of those days. I could see that he was nervous about his speech. So, I smacked him on the back and said, "Hey, big guy, you'll be great!" He looked at me with one of those looks (the really grateful one) and smiled. "Thanks," he said. As he started his speech, he cleared his throat, and began "Graduation is a time to thank those who helped you make it through those tough years. Your parents, your teachers, your siblings, maybe a coach... but mostly your friends... I am here to tell all of you that being a friend to someone is the best gift you can give them. I am going to tell you a story." I just looked at my friend with disbelief as he told the story of the first day we met. He had planned to kill himself over the weekend. He talked of how he had cleaned out his locker so his Mom wouldn't have to do it later and was carrying his stuff home. He looked hard at me and gave me a little smile. "Thankfully, I was saved. My friend saved me from doing the unspeakable." I heard the gasp go through the crowd as this handsome, popular boy told us all about his weakest moment. I saw his Mom and dad looking at me and smiling that same grateful smile. Not until that moment did I realize it's depth. Never underestimate the power of your actions. With one small gesture you can change a person's life. For better or for worse. God puts us all in each others lives to impact one another in some way. Look for God in others. "Friends are angels who lift us to our feet when our wings have trouble remembering how to fly." ----------------------------- I hope you enjoyed it. If yes, check this out... http://www.bestinspiration.com/stories.htm Jibran Ilyas 2007/11/21 What to do with Memories?Who says Walmart has the biggest and the most efficient database in the world? The most powerful database is our memory bank aka our brain. Don't believe me? Ok, try this: Listen to a song from 5 years ago and see what you can remember about that song. You'd be surprised to discover that not only you can pinpoint the locations you heard that song at but you’ll also be able to recall the events from your life from that time. A song is still an easy way of going back to past... sometimes, one little glimpse of an object can take you back in times. You get back so deep so fast that you don’t even remember how you even got there. Anyway, that is a deep subject by itself and I don’t wanna be the one thinking how I ended up there. I just wanted to bring across the point we are full of memories … good, bad, happy, depressing, however they may be, they reside within us and visit our current life every now and then.
So what about them? Well, first let’s just take a moment to celebrate our good memories. You do that while I think about the “so what about them” part of this post
Coming back to the title of this post, What do we do with these memories? I guess the better question is what we CAN do with these memories. The answer, nothing really other than just enjoy / regret ‘em. So, lets shift the focus on what we can do about our future memories aka our present. You may have realized that you have no control of changing the memories you already have, but you DO have total command on what will become your memory in future. Now, I can go into all the granny lectures of 1) Use your time wisely, 2) Appreciate people & help ‘em 3) Live your life to the fullest, etc. But I guess y’all are beyond that and only needed the reminder that you are still the writer, director, producer, cinematographer, etc. of your present and you gotta use those titles to do something for yourself.
Let’s do a practical example of creating a memory while we are at it,
1) Think about a person that is close to you 2) Call or email him/her right now and say that you don’t take ‘em for granted and that you appreciate their existence (Be prepared to get a “is everything ok” question from them) 3) Done, you have just created a memory for yourself.
You might argue that everything that you do becomes a memory. True, but the unusual things you do remain higher on the memory stack, thus easier/more frequently fetched.
Well by now, you must have realized that the posts on this blog don’t always have a point. It’s just the overflow of my brain to yours. On rare occasions, there might be a sentence or two in my blog, that could stand out and make you go, “aah, I never thought about it this way”… Well, that alone makes it worthwhile to write. Anyway, here are some thoughtful quotes on memories. Enjoy!
Until next time, see ya ! Jibran Ilyas
2006/12/25 Time - the fascinatorTime and again, I wonder why time doesn’t ever stop. Where did this word come from? Is it some greek or latin word for continuation? Who discovered time and who decided whether we should use time; and more importantly, who was the ‘genius’ who decided that different parts of the world should use different times.
Now, why did I bother writing this? May be I had plenty of time on my hand or perhaps I am planning to write a thesis on time for my Ph.D. and decided to get an early start. May be I think time has feelings which get hurt if we don’t appreciate it and I am on a mission to earn some appreciation for my best friend time. Or may be I just like to confuse people by raising weird questions about time. By no means, I am trying to be Socrates Part II, nor I am trying to be a preacher on how you should value your time and all of that granny stuff. Infact, I don’t even know if I had a goal in mind at the time I started writing this piece. May be we can all call this abstract, ya? I guess I should let you spend some time reflecting independently. I do want to finish off this write up with a great poem on time by an unknown author. Here it goes, Enjoy your time! Jibran Ilyas |
|
||||||||
发送私人消息
订阅 RSS 源
告诉朋友
添加到 Live.com
添加至您的网络
订阅提醒
Memories are not just about our achievements or failures. They involve people. One funny thing about people in memories is that we always appreciate them in the current times, but 9 out of 10 times, we would’ve taken them for granted.
|
|
