According to a recent survey, nearly half of all consumers believe that their smartphones and other mobile devices are less secure than their laptop or desktop computers. In the same survey, only 36% of respondents said they trust online retail sites to keep their personal data safe. Still, holiday shopping from mobile phones increased by Read more…
Do you use the same smartphone at home and at work? Whether your company allows employees to bring in personal devices or issues office-specific phones and laptops, those devices likely contain sensitive corporate and personal information. Unfortunately, many people use these devices in ways that can jeopardize the security not only of your personal data Read more…
How many of us have simply restored a phone to its factory settings before recycling it or selling it on Craigslist? What if I told you that there could still be data left behind? This week, a mobile forensics team released the results of an experiment meant to discover what kind of data lurks on Read more…
Fans of the epic fantasy series Game of Thrones were understandably eager for the season premier earlier this month. After all, we’d waited since mid-2012 to renew our shared hatred for the most abhorrent monarch in television history, King Joffrey. But while the show’s popularity is good news for creators David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, Read more…
Bitcoin, a new form of electronic money, nabbed global attention yesterday after a hack attack forced a dramatic fall in its value. After trading as high as $147 just a few days prior, the hack knocked an entire bitcoin service offline “indefinitely,” crippling others as the exchanges fought off hack-related trading lags. Wait – What Read more…
Users experienced widespread delays and outages in Internet service around the world this week after a group called Spamhaus made a new addition to its spam blacklist—a Dutch company called Cyberbunker. Email service providers (like Gmail or Hotmail) use blacklist services like Spamhaus to separate likely spam messages from legitimate mail, and as it turns Read more…
Following the lead of companies like Facebook, Google, and Microsoft, Apple last week announced two-step verification (also known as two-factor authentication) to help customers secure their Apple IDs against hackers. Unfortunately, just a day later, a major new security hole was discovered that affected any customer who had not implemented their new two-step security feature. Read more…
Web advertisers got a nasty surprise this week after the discovery of the “Chameleon” botnet, a network of thousands of computers stealing millions of dollars through fake adverts. To-date, researchers have found over 120,000 home PCs infected with Chameleon, and they estimate the bot costs advertisers a whopping $6 million per month. That sounds like Read more…
Computers collect data; It’s a natural side effect of their operation. Every time you open an Internet browser or log into a website, your computer, smartphone, or tablet, information about you is stored. And as privacy and security expert Bruce Schneier points out, while much of this information is innocuous, it only takes one offensive Read more…
Every year around tax season, we see a huge spike in tax-related social engineering attacks. Social engineering is a type of cyber attack that attempts to psychologically manipulate users, tricking them into downloading malicious software or divulging confidential information. Very often, these attacks take the form of a fraudulent email created to mimic an email Read more…