WyzGuys Tech Talk

You do a certain amount of business online.  You belong to a number of social networks.  You shop at major retailers who have loyalty or rewards programs.  You have all sorts of fun apps on your smartphone.  Your smartphone knows your geographic location to within a few inches.  You have a collection of wearable devices that keep track of your footsteps, your travels, your heartbeat, temperature, and respiration, that record everything you see in front of you.  What happens with ...

If you are using one of these passwords, you might as well not have a password.  This is according to a recent post on the Microsoft blog.

• Password
• Letmein
• Monkey
• A pet’s name (i.e. Fluffy)
• 12345678

This five is from another list on the CBS News website that lists the 25 most commonly used passwords in 2013.

• 123456
• password
• 12345678
• qwerty
• abc123

Two of these passwords were common to both lists.

You may be wondering how we know what ...

Doing Sunday Funnies on Saturday.  Sorry – by Sunday I tend to forget to do it.  Sometimes Sunday is a “laptop free day.”  Hey – it happens.

A shout out to my friend and former barber Milo David.  Yes – Colorado is too far to drive for a haircut!  Anyway he shared this on Facebook, and I couldn’t resist, since I love the movie “Taken” and kind of like the State Farm commercial.

According to Bruce Schneier in the September issue of his newsletter Crypto-Gram The NSA and the British counterpart the GCHQ are engaged in a worldwide port scanning operation in order to find vulnerable computers that can be recruited and turned into an ORB, or Operational Relay Box.  Basically our government is creating large “standing armies” of botnets that can be used to attack our “enemies,” real, imaginary, or otherwise.

The issue for business or personal computer users is this:  ...

So in the last two years there have been over 400 retail companies, including many big national chains, that have fallen victim to the BackOff or other Point of sale (POS) malware exploits, revealing millions of credit card and customer records.  So how does this exploit work?

My friends at Calyptix Security sent me another article that should be interesting to anyone who is running ...

This article was written by guest blogger Richard Thompson.  Richard Thompson works for MilesTek which has been providing complete connectivity solutions since 1981. His goal is to provide relevant information to tech conversations across the Internet.  Richard discusses some common vulnerabilities in network switches that can be exploited by cyber-attackers.

Network switches are the hardworking hardware devices we rely on to connect computer networking devices. With so much emphasis put on developing software to combat attacks (such as ARP Spoofing), ...