Nik Cubrilovic

Nik Cubrilovic

Australian-born entrepreneur and hacker. Currently working in advisory and consulting positions, previously at [Techcrunch](https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/techcrunch), [Omnidrive](https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/omnidrive) and a number of other startups since 2000.

Nik has over 15 years of experience as a developer, penetration tester and solutions architect in industries ranging from finance, manufacturing and real estate through to consumer web application development. Nik has worked for and continues to consult and advise startups, SMB’s, venture capital firms and large enterprises including a number of Fortune 100 companies. Nik has worked and lived in Australia, the United Kingdom, South Africa, throughout continental Europe and Asia and is now based in San Francisco, USA.

Nik has contributed to a large number of open-source projects and published a number of security vulnerabilities for various platforms and applications since 1996. Nik is an advocate of consumer privacy and security protection, applying cryptography to all communication, the Tor anonymity network, Bitcoin and a number of other security and privacy related projects and initiatives. In 2007, he was named in The Bulletin magazine as one of Australia’s “”Smart 100″”.

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Latest from Nik Cubrilovic

  • The Anatomy of The Twitter Attack: Part II

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    During and after Twittergate, when a hacker broke into a few hosted email accounts and obtained a number of internal documents, I had an opportunity to spend hours speaking to the actual attacker and document how he carried out the attack. The article was called The Anatomy of The Twitter Attack, and today we unfortunately find ourselves with a sequel to that post as the Twitter DNS servers… Read More

  • Twitter Hack: Part Of Broader Iranian Strategy

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    Late last night the popular micro-messaging service Twitter was attacked and had its website defaced by a group calling itself the Iranian Cyber Army. The Twitter homepage and the main application service page were replaced with a bold pro-Iranian and anti-American message. The message was loud, and very clear – the attack was in response to what Iran saw as internal meddling by the… Read More

  • Barnes and Noble Nook e-Book Reader Rooted

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    The recently released e-book reader from Barnes & Noble, the Nook, has been rooted by the community of enthusiasts at nookdevs.com. The complete instructions for hacking the device and obtaining root access are detailed on the site. The Nook went on sale in late November and aims to compete with the dominant Amazon Kindle, a device which has spurred its own community of hackers and… Read More

  • RockYou Hack: From Bad To Worse

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    Earlier today news spread that social application site RockYou had suffered a data breached that resulted in the exposure of over 32 Million user accounts. To compound the severity of the security breach, it was found that RockYou are storing all user account data in plain text in their database, exposing all that information to attackers. RockYou have yet to inform users of the breach, and… Read More

  • appendTo Aims To Commercialize jQuery Javascript Library

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    jQuery is a Javascript library that is used in a large number of web applications and is popular amongst web application developers. It was launched in 2006 by John Resig, and immediately gained a large following due to its lightweight nature and design philosophy. jQuery allows developers to build Javascript web applications easily by abstracting many of the complexities and difficulties. Read More

  • Textbook Rental Market Heats Up: BookRenter Raises $6M Series A

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    Earlier this month college textbook rental company Chegg raised $112M as part of a combined Series D and debt round, bringing the total raised by the company to a massive $144M. Competitor BookRenter will tomorrow announce a Series A round of $6M, raised from Storm Ventures and Adams Capital Management. BookRenter has only raised a fraction of the capital of their competitor Chegg, but the… Read More

  • Facebook: Please Back Developers vs iPhone

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    In July of last year, I wrote about The New Apple Walled Garden. The post was about the irony of developers and advocates who were otherwise open standards and open source champions being absolutely pro-iPhone, a platform that is closed and proprietary in every sense. Since that post, the horror that was foreshadowed by some has been realized – rejected apps, rejected apps, rejected apps. Read More

  • PHP Founder Rasmus Lerdorf Leaves Yahoo

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    PHP founder Rasmus Lerdorf has left his long-held position at Yahoo, according to his Twitter account. Lerdorf joined Yahoo in 2002 and has worked for the company as an engineer since. Lerdorf is most notable for creating the original PHP engine, and for being a notable open source developer, speaker and author. Lerdorf developed PHP in 1995 after building up a collection of C macros that he… Read More

  • (Updated) Downtime At Rackspace Cloud

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    A large number of customers of Rackspace Cloud, including Techcrunch, have been experiencing downtime for the past 1h 20m or so. The status blog reports that the service was degraded, and other reports state that it is due to a power outage at the Dallas network operations center. Customers of both Rackspace Cloud and Slicehost are affected, putting services such as Posterous, Dailybooth… Read More

  • Enterprise

    Neo Technology Commercializes Next Generation Graph Based Database

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    A new generation of database products and companies is beginning to emerge, and one of the more interesting examples is Swedish-based Neo Technology, the developer and vendor of the neo4j graph based database (graph in the data structure sense). The neo4j product has been in development for over 8 years, and Neo Technology are today announcing a new $2.5M round of funding. The company has… Read More

  • Enterprise

    Amazon Launches Hosted MySQL Database Cloud Service

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    Amazon has launched a hosted relational database service, Amazon RDS, as part of the suite of services available at AWS. The new service is a hosted MySQL database instance with the full capabilities and access rights as a normal self-hosted DB. As a hosted solution, instances are easily created and available almost immediately. Pricing stars at $0.11c per hour for the smallest scale… Read More

  • Amazon Launches Hosted MySQL Database Cloud Service

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    Amazon has launched a hosted relational database service, Amazon RDS, as part of the suite available at AWS. The new service is a hosted MySQL database instance with the full capabilities and access rights as a normal self-hosted DB. As a hosted solution, the service has an ability to scale out across computational, memory and storage requirements while still being treated as a single db… Read More

  • Twitter: You Say Transparency, I Say Vulnerability

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    We received a number of tips early this morning that the majority of web servers at Twitter was exposing server and load-balancer status information to the public. The status page, which are an (often default) option in the open source Apache web server dump an output of all connections and state information for a particular server. The information is used by administrators to monitor servers… Read More

  • Yammer Extended Outage. Update: It's Back!

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    Yammer, the Twitter-like short messaging service for business users, has been experiencing a prolonged period of downtime today due to DNS issues. The service first went down over 12 hours ago, was alive for a short period tonight, and then became unresponsive again a few hours ago. The issue is also affecting sister company Geni, who share the same DNS servers. Read More

  • Relevance Over Time

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    When email was first created in 1965 it was used as a method to communicate between time-shared mainframe computers. Email has rapidly evolved since then, with the evolution of rich desktop clients, corporate email systems and webmail. Despite the evolution in the core messaging system, and despite the explosion in use of email, the default method for accessing and viewing communications… Read More

  • Letting Data Die A Natural Death

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    The big story today is about Microsoft subsidiary Danger losing all T-Mobile Sidekick customer data from their servers. Danger is the company noted for the T-Mobile Sidekick, the revolution in cloud mobile, and most memorably, almost everybody living in 90210 having to get new phone numbers because of Paris Hilton. Valued T-Mobile Sidekick customers received a notice today from the company… Read More

  • Google Forces Web Standards Issue Using Sexy Buttons

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    Google made a very minor but significant change to their search homepage earlier this week. While everybody else was distracted by the barcode logo, a few Chrome and Safari users may have noticed that the search buttons now have a certain zing to them, a new and pretty look, with slightly rounded corners, a border around them and a cool looking gradient. Now, before you think or say… Read More

  • On The Internet, Nobody Knows You're Not In The USA

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    A large number of web services are geographically restricted, such as Hulu, Pandora and Spotify. The reasons are usually to do with content licensing restrictions, or because US visitors (or visitors from other advanced economies) are of a higher value from a monetization perspective. A web application can only guess at the location of a visitor based on an IP address and other information… Read More

  • Twitter Should Decentralize (And Make Money) Via Twitter Server

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    The background debate about whether or not Twitter can actually scale has intensified. More than a year ago I asked “Twitter At Scale: Will It Work?” Today Twitter is far, far bigger. And the uptime woes continue. The big problem with Twitter is asyncronous following without limitations on the number of connections, which means that a single account can theoretically have a number… Read More

  • Squidoo Backs Down On 'Brand Campaign' As Many Are 'Not so Happy' About It

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    Squidoo founder and author Seth Godin has backed down on creating company pages by default as part of their new ‘Brands In Public’ service that launched a few days ago. The idea behind the new service is that brands are able to track feedback from customers on a public ‘lense’ (aka. a web page). Feedback is aggregated from multiple sources, but mostly twitter and mostly… Read More

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