According to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), there are seven strategies that will prevent 85% of targeted attacks. To this list I have added a few of my favorites.
Social networks are a tremendous source of personal information leakage. Actually, more like a waterfall. As we learned in the last post, attackers use social networks to perform reconnaissance against their chosen targets. Since few of us are going to delete all our social network accounts and move of the grid, we have to find a way to live ...
Almost all cyber-crime is about making money for the crooks. Often this involves stealing valuable information that can be sold. But many criminal gangs are going straight for the cash, and often this involves bank and financial account fraud or financial account access.
Below we have a list of strategies you can use to protect your financial resources.
Believe it or not, two out of three people in the United States have had their personal information stolen by cyber-criminals. The likelihood is that this has already happened to you, and if not, it will happen eventually. And if it has happened, it will probably happen again. Why is this?
Even if you never click on a phishing email, ...
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As a regular reader of this blog, you are probably using a long, unique, 20 character password with two-factor authentication, and a password manager to keep it all straight. But let’s say that you fall for a phishing scam, and give away the password to your email account. The attacker can now use your email account to request password reset emails from your other online accounts, and you have yourself one ...
Facebook has added USB key security to it’s two-factor authentication options. Previously, Facebook users could add the additional security of two-factor authentication to their account by using the Facebook app to receive a six digit one-time passcode, or by having the code sent to their smart phone via SMS text message. Facebook now supports the open-source Universal 2 Factor (U2F) standard established by the FIDO Alliance, such as the Yubikey from ...
NIST is working on new authentication standards, and there are some surprising changes coming out of this effort. One of the issues that NIST is dealing with is the use of biometrics for authentication. But there are problems with biometrics. Here they are from the NIST Special Publication 800-63b. Emphasis is mine.
For a variety of reasons, ...
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Passwords are not dead – not yet. But they are on life support. They are no longer enough to truly secure anything on their own.
I just read an sobering, eye-popping article on NetMux that discussed easy ways to crack passwords that are longer than 12 characters.
What makes this so disheartening for me is that I have been telling everyone to increase their password ...
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On Wednesday we talked about a phishing exploit that used malware to provide remote access and steal the personal information of the victims. Today we continue the story with a similar exploit, called “Fareit” to “ferret out” the user credentials and other personal information the victims.
This exploit uses a phishing email to send the target either a PDF attachment or a Word attachment. The PDF variant uses Windows Powershell to install. ...
Continue Reading →One of these URLs will open your Gmail account. The other will take you to a replica phishing landing page to steal your Gmail password. Can you tell which is which?
If you chose the first one as fake, and the second one as genuine, you ...
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