Yahoo is introducing some enhancements to its email service, including actively replacing the traditional password with something more secure that a password alone, and easier than two factor authentication a la Google Authenticator. The new Yahoo feature is called Yahoo Account Key and use a push notification to an email customer’s cell phone or smart watch to verify a user’s identity.
This feature is ...
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Can we stop calling this terrorism, and call it what it is – warfare!
The day after ISIS claimed responsibility for the acts of war carried out in Paris by trained members of the ISIS military, members of the hacker collective Anonymous declared war on ISIS.
Continue Reading →“On Friday 13 November our country France was attacked in Paris for two hours, by multiple ...
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 ...
I’ve been warning about the dangers of self-aware machines for some time.
Here is a story about how a toaster disrupted a keynote address by ARM CEO Simon Segars at the annual ARM TechCon Conference. It seems that the toaster was toasting a bagel which got stuck, and started burning. The smoke caused the fire alarms to go of in the ...
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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 ...
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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 ...
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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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