How Do You Know If Your Identity Was Stolen?

Identity theft can be devastating, and painfully hard to resolve.  It can have negative effects on your credit rating.  It could result in you being arrested for an open warrant on charges for a crime committed by the person who is using your identity.  Identity theft occurs in different ways.  Sometimes is is part of an online scam that may start with a ...

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Anti-Drone Tactics

Drones have become the must-have item for many people this year.  Some of them are your neighbors, and they may be annoying you or intruding on your privacy.  On the other hand, it may be a member of our military hunting a terrorist.  Or, increasingly, it may be a terrorist using a drone to provide surveillance, or worse yet, deliver something deadly like ...

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The Google Docs Hoax: What Have We Learned?

It has been a couple of weeks since the Google Docs hoax spread across the Internet like wildfire.  What have we learned about this exploit?

Originally this appeared to be a phishing campaign, but phishing emails are spoofed clever replicas.  These emails were the genuine article, and were sent from Google mail servers, from the hijacked Google accounts of people you were likely to know.  This made the exploit difficult to ...

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This Will Make You Wanna Cry

A post about an alert I received first from AlienVault, and then from everybody.  There is a new crypto-ransomware variant called Wanna Cry that is taking advantage of a recent Microsoft vulnerability that was patched back on March 14.  If your computers have not been updated with MS17-010, then those computers are vulnerable.  Microsoft considers this vulnerability significant enough to release it for Windows XP, even though official support ended over ...

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Are You Breached? Know What To Look For

The average number of days between a network intrusion and it’s detection by the victim is around 200 days, which is at least 199 days too long.  Sooner or later your company will suffer an network intrusion, computer incident, or data breach, in spite of your best efforts to prevent it.  The goal is to shorten the time between intrusion and detection.

A recently article on Tech ...

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The Economics of the Tech Support Scam

We have reported a few times about the tech support scammers who use cold-calling phone lists or browser pop-ups with 800 number “support” lines to trick people into paying $300 or more for “malware removal” and other services that the computer doesn’t need.  And the pop-ups can be scary and convincing as in the example image.

Naked Security recently reported on the work ...

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Linksys Wireless Routers Have Security Vulnerabilities

Research firm IOActive recently released a an article that revealed some serious security deficiencies on popular Linksys Smart Wi-Fi products.  They have notified Linksys, and Linksys is working on the firmware upgrades that will be necessary to fix these issue, and they have issued a security advisory.

Among the vulnerabilities discovered:

  • Unauthenticated attacker can create a ...
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Why Biometrics Aren’t the Answer

Happy World Password Day.  I have been following the progress that NIST is making in formulating new standards for user authentication.  Something I found surprising was that NIST is not recommending using biometrics as a form of authentication.  The two main reasons are that biometrics, such as fingerprints, iris scans, and voice recognition, are not a secret.  For instance, you leave your fingerprints behind everywhere you touch ...

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FBI: Lottery Scammer Pleads Guilty

Back in December we wrote about FBI Operation Hard Copy in order to warn our readers about telemarketing lottery scams and how they work.  Recently, the FBI reported that one of the people arrested in that operation had plead guilty to one count of wire fraud.

According to the FBI:

Ronald John Mendleski, 72, of Bokeelia, Florida, pleaded guilty to one count of wire fraud before U. S. Magistrate ...

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