There are many online accounts that would be bad to lose control of, such as your Amazon, eBay, PayPal, or bank account. But by the far the worst account to lose is your email account. If I can trick you into giving me your email user ID and password, by using a phishing email, or phone pretext call, I will be in. I can start off by simply observing, as I read your emails, ...
Passwords – Is mine strong enough? How do I know? Every time I write a password article I feel as if this subject has already been done to death by me and others. But I always get more positive feedback on this subject than others I consider more interesting, so we offer the following suggestions:
I am getting posts from the FBI and the Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3), and received this interesting warning on November 18th of last year. This warning was sent to law enforcement and public officials, but if you have come to the point in your life were you are feeling a bit overexposed on the Internet, these tips can help you too.
For some of us, a few of these suggestions ...
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As we approach the new year it is traditional to make our New Year’s Resolutions. Unfortunately, most resolutions are made but not kept, so I am a little reluctant to offer these ideas for improving your cybersecurity in the coming year. But if you have not climbed on the cybersecurity bandwagon yet, you are definitely overdue. Pick a few of these ideas to implement in your business.
Here they are:
One of the security practices that I am always looking for is two-factor or multi-factor authentication. This is when you need a user name, a password, and a special code or device to provide the second authentication factor.
I have been using Google Authenticator with my extensive set Google accounts and with the password manager LastPass. I was happy to learn that I can ...
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My Facebook friend Jeff Wegge asked: “Security question Bob. Is the hotspot on my mobile verizon phone any more secure than public Wi-Fi?”
This is a most excellent question! Generally speaking, the mobile hotspot will be more secure for two reasons The first is that only you are likely to be using it, unless you explicitly shared the SSID (network name) and passphrase with someone else. The second reason ...
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If you are having trouble managing “all those passwords” for your online resources, one solution would be to use a password manager like LastPass or Dashlane. Google has come up with a single sign-on (SSO) product that not only will log you into all your Google apps (Gmail, Voice, Blogger, YouTube, Apps, Drive, Analytics, AdWords, etc) but also integrates access into 17 ...
According to a post on Sophos, Comcast has reset the passwords on 200,000 customers after a security researcher discovered an advertisement on the Dark Web offering to sell 500,000 Comcast passwords in pain text for $1000 in BitCoin. Investigation by Comcast found that “only” 200,000 of there accounts were active and proactively reset the passwords on all the affected accounts. ...
Would you buy your password from an 11-year old girl? I would, and maybe you should, too. Mira Modi, an 11-year old New Yorker, has very very cool service called Diceware. Using a technique developed by Arnold Reinhold, Mira uses dice to come up with a unique 6 word passphrase, which she will send to you in the US Mail. Her fee is two bucks.
Understanding that passwords are cracked by cyber-criminals one of two ways, either ...
Continue Reading →Back in July we wrote a review of our experiences with LastPass, a popular password management program. For the record, I am still using it, and still liking it, although there is no way I would use a password manager without some form of two-factor authentication, such as Google Authenticator. For some people, this is going to be too much.
There ...
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