Remember late last year when the Russian Cyber Army was supposedly hacking the Vermont electrical grid?
Well, squirrels and other critters are still doing more damage to the electric grid than cyber-attacks have. When are we going to round up all these little terrorists and ship them off to Gitmo?
I got my OFFICIAL DAISY RED RYDER RANGE MODEL 1938 AIR RIFLE BB GUN loaded ...
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I read an interesting article on Naked Security the other day about how Hamas had used Facebook and social engineering tactics to trick Israeli soldiers into installing surveillance malware. The malware allowed Hamas to track the soldiers using the phone’s GPS, and to turn on the microphone and video to actually listen in and and watch their targets. Hamas undoubtedly picked up the ...
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 ...
If you are an Apple user, Apple released a number of updates released late in January that will fix security vulnerabilities in several platforms and services. It was reported by US-CERT on January 23rd.
The release for Mac OSX Sierra is large, at 105 GB, and fixes many holes that would allow and attacker to remotely execute malware. This is something you should fix ...
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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, ...
Continue Reading →Wow. Microsoft discovered some last minute issues with February’s Patch Tuesday update, and cancelled them. You can read about it on TechNet. They will be reissued at a later date, after suitable repairs are made.
As a user who had occasionally found myself on the wrong end of an update that caused my computer to misbehave, all I can say is “Thank you Microsoft.”
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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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