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, ...
Continue Reading →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 ...
Continue Reading →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, ...
Continue Reading →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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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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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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Heck, I had golfed 5 times by this time last year. This came from Michael Dell, but I am sure he boosted it from somewhere.
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
Small business owners need to be on their guard for email frauds like the one described in this article on Sophos. This is a must read, and must share with your controller, bookkeeper, or office manager.
Continue Reading →Slovenian police on Thursday raided 12 homes and arrested five Slovenian citizens in connection with sending malware-packed email to small and medium businesses’ accounting departments.
The email was spoofed to look like it came from a local bank or, in one case, the ...