As we get into the summer travel season, here are a few recommendations to help you security your smartphones, tablets, and laptops. Let’s remember that even short trips from home to the coffee shop or library can expose you and your devices to risks.
Wireless access points represent a point of entry when you are away from home. Most coffee houses and restaurants offering public wireless Internet do so using access ...
I’ve been hearing stories about baby cams, nanny cams, laptop cams, computer cams, and inexpensive home security cameras that have been hijacked due to poor or non-existent security setting, and set up for viewing on the camera feed aggregation site www.insecam.org. These feeds are not just nurseries, but bedrooms, living rooms, and a variety of exterior locations. These feds also display GPS coordinates, which makes it trivial to find the exact location of the feed source. See an ...
Continue Reading →Saw this for the first time this week and had to include it. Apparently there are a bunch of “Hitler and…” parodies on YouTube. So enjoy at your own risk.
Continue Reading →As the age of password authentication falls to newer and faster password cracking hardware, software, and list building tools, technologists have been looking at other authentication methods. Many of these techniques we have covered here: two-factor authentication (2FA), secure key, smartphone authentication apps, Google’s USB security dongle, fingerprint readers, and other biometrics.
Recently, Samsung, together with SRI, have started working on an iris recognition authentication methodology called IOM or “Iris On the Move.” The human iris, the colored part of the eye, ...
Continue Reading →Modern cyber criminals are using more sophisticated blended attacks to achieve some pretty spectacular monetary hauls. The Dyre Wolf malware exploits is currently be combined with a spear-phishing approach, a telephone based social engineering middle, and a distributed denial of service (DDOS) attack on the back end to access corporate bank accounts and wire transfer large sums of money. Originally uncovered by IBM’s security team in 2014, this exploit had netted on cyber-crime group over $1 million dollars. The IBM ...
Continue Reading →CryptoLocker and CryptoWall are largely defunct now, but there are new strains of encryption malware at large on the Internet. If you fall victim to any of the new ransomware exploits such as Teslacrypt or Ophionlocker, there is bad news, and there is OK news, and there may be good news.
The bad news is that once the encryption malware has finished encrypting all of your personal files in the Documents, Pictures, Music, and Video folders and other stuff in your User ...
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Microsoft is putting the finishing touches on its latest operating system, Windows 10. We already have published in a previous article that this new OS will be a free upgrade from Windows 7 Service Pack 1 or Windows 8.1. If you are keeping your computers current via Windows Update, your upgrade will be available from there. It will also be possible to download an ISO image to bring to ...
A “bot-net” is a robot network comprised of hundreds, thousands, or even millions of “zombie hosts,” as computers that are infected with bot malware are called. Botnets are created by a type of professional cyber-criminal known as a “bot-herder,” and generally rented out to other criminals for sending millions of spam messages daily, running huge parallel processing tasks such as password cracking operation, or used by extortionists, hacktivists, and government ...
Minnesota’s new smartphone “kill switch” law takes effect on July 1, 2015. It requires that all smartphones sold in Minnesota come with a preinstalled kill switch or a free app which provides the same function. A similar law in California takes effect on the same date, but requires all phones come with the app preinstalled. Federal legislation has been proposed, but so ...
