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…
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…
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…
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…