SCADA Plus Smartphone Equals Insecure Utilities

What if cyber-criminals or enemy nations could take over the computer control systems that run electric utilities, water systems, or traffic control systems for traffic lights and commuter trains.  The effects could be disastrous.

We have written about these systems before.  These are known as SCADA (supervisory control and data acquisition) or ICS (industrial control systems).  One of the claims of the industries that use SCADA systems is that they are inherently ...

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Typosquatting – When Domain Name Typing Errors Produce Unfortunate Results

Registering common misspellings of popular website domain names is a big business.  A recent study found that 80% of all possible one-character typographical variants of Facebook, Google, and Apple are registered.  Registering close misspellings of domain names is know as “typosquatting.”

Security company Sophos recently analysed all the possible one-letter variations of six popular websites, a whopping 2249 unique site names.  Of the 2249 possibilities, 67% or 1502 domain names were actually registered.  ...

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Weekend Update

A quick Saturday digest of cybersecurity news articles from other sources.


Tax Identity Theft Awareness Week

File early or an impostor may get your refund.  Especially now that the Equifax credit trove is in the wild.

01/29/2018 08:27 AM EST  Original release date: January 29, 2018

Tax Identity Theft Awareness Week is January ...

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Do You Accept Credit Cards? How Credit Card Breaches Happen

If your business accepts credit cards for payment, then your a subject to the regulations of the Payment Card Industry.  This is known as PCI-DSS Compliance.  PCI compliance company Security Metrics recently released an infographic that shows the main compliance failures that lead to credit card breaches in 2017.  Here are some of the startling take-aways:

  • Businesses that took credit ...
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Phishing Sites Using HTTPS Too

When you see the secure HTTPS protocol at the beginning of a web address, or see the green “secure site” padlock symbol, does this mean that the site is safe?  Unfortunately, the answer is NO.  There is some confusion among computer users about what HTTPS really means.  This confusion is being exploited by cyber-criminals running phishing exploits.

HTTPS or secure hypertext ...

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How Email Accounts Are Hijacked

The most devastating exploit that can happen to you is to have your email account hijacked.  We have spilled a lot of pixels on this subject (see below).  The reason we find this so dangerous is that it is that this is the attack most likely to happen to you.

Google recently released a study that analyzed how Gmail accounts are hijacked.  If you have an Android smartphone, you have a ...

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The End of Passwords?

Every year some pundit declares that the password will soon be dead.  I have been proclaiming for several years now that the password, by itself, is no longer a suitably strong form of security, and have been a champion for two-factor authentication.

Microsoft has recently stated that their Windows Hello facial recognition system is a suitable replacement for passwords.  Windows Hello ...

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Congress Acts To Secure Electronic Voting Machines

As long as we are on the subject of election rigging and tampering, it is notable that Congress has finally weighed in on the subject of insecure and hackable electronic voting machines.  According to a recent TechDirt article, “A new bipartisan bill has been introduced, called the Secure Elections Act, that would actually ...

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Russia Meddles in Another Election – Sweden

I recently caught a story on the BBC World News via PBS.  Anders Thornberg, the director of Swedish Security Services (SAPO) was accusing the Russians of engaging in social media driven misinformation campaign very similar to what happened in recent elections in France and Germany, and in the US during the last Presidential Election.  Evidently Putin is concerned that Sweden may join NATO, and is actively campaigning for candidates who are opposed to NATO.

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Fifty Years of Computing – Doug Engelbart

Fifty years ago, in 1968, computers were big mainframe systems that were programmed using large decks of punch cards.  All output came out of a printer.  There were no computer displays yet, just rows of blinking light bulbs that were call a “monitor.”  All programs were run as batch jobs, one at a time.  There were no windows, no multi-tasking, no interactive computing as we know it today.

On December 8, 1968 a computer engineer named Doug Engelbart made a presentation ...

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