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 ...
Yes Virginia, you do need a password. And because passwords are being cracked by high-end machines running sophisticated password cracking programs, it need to be both long and complex, and ideally, unique to each site or device. How long? At least ten, to maybe as many as fifteen characters is ideal. A six or seven character password can be cracked in hours or days; a password of ten or more characters requires decades or centuries. A strong password cannot be ...
Continue Reading →Microsoft introduced Windows 8 last October, and we have developed a brand new class to address the major changes that it brings to the computer user experience. Because this is a transition period between Windows 8 and Windows7, some of the districts are still offering Windows 7. You can register by clicking through on the link below. Choose carefully so you get the Windows 8 or Windows 7 class you want.
Continue Reading →Who moved my cheese! Windows 8 is ...