Hacker Wars – USA vs. China

Thanks to Edward Snowden, the NSA whistleblower, we now know for certain what many of us suspected all along – the government of the United States is spying on its citizens – on everyone with a cell phone, landline, or Internet connection.

This revelation broke as President Obama was meeting with the new premier of China, Xi Jinping.  Part of the meeting was Obama telling the Chinese Premier to knock it off with all the hacking that China has mounted against ...

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Security Policy for On-line Banking

If my last post made you want to tear out your Internet connection and go back to burying your money in coffee cans in the backyard, despair not.  Here is a really great idea that will allow you to secure your online banking in ways that will be hard to defeat.  This comes to us courtesy of Krebs on Security.

Cyber-criminals gain a foothold on your business network by infecting your computer with some sort of malware, ...

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NC Fuel Company Loses $800K to Cyber-Thieves

Here is a perfect example of what I was talking about in my last post.   To read the full gruesome details go to the Sophos blog.

Basically, a small, 15 employee fuel distribution company in North Carolina suffered an $800,000 loss due to changes that their bank made to the security of the online banking system.  The old system required a user to log in from a known and approved IP address, enter a password and a ...

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Vulnerable to Cyber Crime–Survey Says Only 36% of Small Businesses Apply Security Updates

Ok, so this number is from a recent study in England, but I am willing to bet that the numbers are about the same in the U.S.

This study was reported by Sophos recently, and it supports my own observations of my own clients.  Not very many of my small business clients have a security policy that is followed by the workers in the company.  Most companies opt for convenience over security, and are using short, easily broken passwords, ...

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How to Rob Two Arabian Banks of $45 Million Dollars

You can’t pull this off with a ski mask and a gun.  A major bank heist that cleared a $45 million haul from two banks on the Arabian peninsula was pulled off by an international cyber-crime crew during two days, one in December 2012 and and the other in February 2013.  The story reads like a crime novel or Hollywood movie.

First, in December, cyber-criminals gained access to the databases of an Indian company that handles the debit card transactions of ...

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Passwords–Longer Beats Complex

I ran across an article on the PCWorld web site, that explains why longer simpler passwords are better than shorter more complex passwords.  It is basically about hacking time.  Passwords are cracked using automated programs that make thousands of attempts per second.  They are cracked from long lists of encrypted password hashes that are stolen from web servers.  The resulting clear text passwords are recorded and sold as “rainbow tables”  If I have a good rainbow table and ...

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Phone Call From Site Operator While Surfing Their Site?

My question is – has this ever happened to you?  If you were on a web site, and they called your phone, would that seem creepy? Or just super friendly? Or is super friendly kind of creepy?  I would love to here your experience or comments about this.
This is a new one for me. I got a call from a client who was on a web site for professional organizers, and while on the site she got a phone call ...
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Happy 20th Birthday World Wide Web 30 April 2013

Twenty years ago on April 30, 1993 Tim Berners-Lee, a physicist at the CERN Physics Lab in Geneva Switzerland presented the networking protocols that created the World Wide Web. (No – NOT Al Gore!!) The Internet, such as it was back then, was the child of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Arpanet, 1969), and had become a disparate mash-up of competing proprietary networks, such as CompuServe, Prodigy (remember), and the fledgling American On-Line, Gopher (see below), and others my ...

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Add a Start Menu to Windows 8

Windows 8 introduced some significant changes to the user interface, most significantly replacing the Start Menu and Start Button with the tile-laden Start Screen.

Just want your Start Button and Start Menu back?  Try the free download from Classic Shell.  I’ve used it and it works pretty well.  You can choose from the classic Windows 95-98 menu, the two column Windows XP menu, or the newer Windows 7 menu.  Download from www.ClassicShell.net

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