Happy New Year! This week we are going to investigate ways that we can recover some of our personal privacy and enhance the our security our online lives.
Let’s face it, many of us have been running amok on the Internet, busily sharing all sorts of personal information on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Snapchat, and who knows where else. Every time we buy something online, ...
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It’s Halloween tomorrow, the traditional time when we dress up in scary or not-so scary costumes to disguise our identity and trick our friends and family. It’s good to remember that malware often uses disguises to trick us into committing an action that releases the attack. What follows are my scary Halloween stories.
So you bought yourself a new computer. It has everything, a touch screen, built in WiFi and Bluetooth, anything you could want. And a whole bunch of stuff you didn’t want, in the form of pre-installed software programs, trial-ware, and other bloat-ware and crap-ware that causes an unrelenting stream of pop-ups asking you to purchase and activate these mostly worthless programs.
Is it time to change your password? Now that security researcher Alex Holden, of Hold Security in Milwaukee has uncovered a huge trove of stolen user credentials on the Dark Net, you might as well assume that yours are in this mammoth collection.
Alex Holden was born in the Ukraine, and his current surname is not the one he was given at birth. But he discovered that Russian cyber-criminals had gathered 542 million email addresses and 1.2 billion unique email and ...
Continue Reading →Bloatware, crapware, trialware, PUPs Potentially Unwanted Programs) This stuff fills up our hard drive and usually has a component that starts automatically when we reboot our computer. With all this unnecessary stuff running in the background, your computer runs slower. And a lot of this stuff pushes advertising, either as pop-up, search redirects, or on the web pages we are viewing. Where does all this stuff come from?
If you bought your computer at retail, much of this stuff comes preinstalled. ...
Continue Reading →One of my collegues sent a link to a BBC article about the Sinowal Trojan horse , which is also known as Torpig and Mebroot. This trojan installs itself on victims’ computers when they simply visit certain web sites, and collects banking and credit card information and reports back to the what appear to be eastern European and Russian criminal gangs, such as the Russin Business Network. Links to the article are here.
Your best form of protection ...
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