I read an article recently on Dark Matters, by Bob Monroe, that talked about smartphones from the perspective on an attacker – just how good of an attack surface is your average smartphone? Pretty good, as it turns out, which is not so good for you and me.
The first problem is that these little computers are very chatty. If they are turned on, they are talking to the nearest cell ...
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We recently learned that credit report service Experian had a breach of T-Mobile customer information. This is just another addition to the pile of Personally Identifying Information (PII) that has been exfiltrated from sundry organizations including the Office of Personnel Management, various BlueCross BlueShield organizations, and Harvard University.
So what to do when this happens to you? When you are notified by the ...
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We try to save up some funny stuff for our Sunday Funnies post, and I admit this is pretty borderline. Maybe not funny. But I do love corporate-speak, and since tomorrow we will be discussing the things you can do if your personal information is part of a data breach, we thought this might be a fun way to open this discussion.
Thanks to our friends at Sophos, for ...
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Using BASIC or Visual BASIC programming scripts can add automation and other functions to documents created in the Microsoft Office productivity suite of products. Unfortunately, this feature can be used by cyber-attackers to send malware exploits in otherwise innocuous looking documents that most people would open without a second thought.
The macro virus goes back to 1995, the most infamous being the Melissa email macro virus that $80 million in damages to ...
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The new EMV chip-style credit cards are here, and the FBI has already released a warning about the way they are being deployed in the United States. The EMV card has been in continuous use in Europe and Asia for over a decade, and has worked well to reduce the amount of credit card fraud there. We have had to wait here in the US simply because it ...
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 ...
Continue Reading →Great advice, but the whole exchange by text kind of kills operational security on this caper. From Pinterest
This comes under the heading of “know who you are doing business with.” Web hosting company 000webhost.com was breached this week and over 13 million customer records were stolen and posted for sale on the Internet. The data includes customer names, emails and passwords in plaintext (meaning the passwords were unencrypted). Storing passwords in an unencrypted form should be a criminal act in ...
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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.
OK, so Monday I lampooned the Director of the CIA for using AOL email to transmit top secret CIA files (yikes). And of course we all remember the Hillary Rodham Clinton kerfuffle over her use of her own private email service to transmit State Department documents (better). One has to assume that this pretty flagrant violation of what has to be well known government policies by people who probably know better ...