Your smartphone knows everything about you but is your information safe? From banking to global positioning system (GPS), there are many reasons to protect the personal data on your mobile device. Hackers are targeting the Android operating system and there are steps you should be taking to protect yourself. Malware is a generic term used Read more…
Don’t get between your kids and the Internet! Plugged in through all manner of devices, your child is constantly active online, divulging every detail of his or her life. To a generation raised on reality TV, it comes as second nature to share location-based status updates, post photos and videos to public networks, play interactive Read more…
Cybercriminals are adopting complex and powerful techniques to “hack,” or take control of online accounts belonging to other people or organizations. Often, they do this by identifying the passwords belonging to an account user. This used to be a complicated task, but, as The Atlantic notes, discovering passwords today can be as simple as running Read more…
This week the Federal Government scored a major victory over a massive worldwide network of cybercriminals by shutting down Liberty Reserve, a criminal business venture disguised as a bank that was fronting a secret money system for everyone from credit card and identity thieves to Ponzi scheme peddlers, hackers for hire, and money launderers. Liberty Read more…
Late last week, Walmart alerted the public to an email-based scam that used the company’s name (misspelled as “Wallmart”) to illegally gather information about users. The email sported the title “Thanks for your Walmart.com order,” and after confused users clicked on links within the emails, their Walmart accounts were charged. While local police departments and Read more…
Last week during his keynote speech at the Interop IT conference, PayPal’s Chief Information Security Officer Michael Barrett pointed to a slide depicting a tombstone for passwords with the dates 1961-2013. According to Barrett, while passwords are still required for so many applications and services, they have simply outlived their usefulness. Barrett predicted that we Read more…
To celebrate Password Day, I wanted to share some new research that takes a look at how secure social media accounts are. As you may have read in my blog from yesterday, the Associated Press was recently the target of a Twitter account hack. The account was recovered, but not before hackers managed to send Read more…
It has become increasingly common for personal and professional social media accounts to become ‘hacked’, or taken over by someone who doesn’t own the account. Twitter’s help center points out that this occurs from weak passwords, a pre-existing password-collecting virus on your computer or by entrusting your login credentials to malicious third-party websites and applications. Read more…
As you may recall from earlier posts in my blog, a denial-of-service (DDoS) attack occurs when hackers flood a target website with large amounts of traffic. This traffic is often generated through the hacker’s botnet, or network of infected computers. Usually, when a cybercriminal launches a DDoS attack on a website, there isn’t much for Read more…
New research has concluded that despite best efforts to keep search results clean, Google and Bing often serve malware-infected sites among their top search results. This malware (or malicious software) can include sites infected with viruses, Trojans, computer worms, and more, making it extremely important for consumers to pay close attention to what they click. Read more…