There is a reason for information security and best practices. Ignoring things like setting strong passwords and having an account lockout policy will have perilous consequences. Just ask the 10,000 applicants to Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences who had their personal information, including their social security numbers, uploaded to Bit Torrent. That data […]
By Mark O’Neill Despite the proliferation of file storage sites on the internet such as Dropbox, I am still a bit of an old fashioned geek at heart and I always end up emailing big files to people by zipping them first. But old-fashioned as I am, I am also paranoid, so I always encrypt […]
Horror stories about how corporations get their important data stolen from mobile devices have been plentiful in the past few years. To fight the problem, most companies now require that hard drives inside their mobile fleet get encrypted before leaving in the hands of employees. Normally, such a means would be more than enough to […]
The Newton virus is a perfectly inoffensive little Mac application that will never replicate itself, mail itself to your contact list or delete any of your files. According to its designer, it was made to revive the golden era of “fun” viruses, which were created to make pranks upon your friends. The little critter comes […]
Infoworld reports on a new survey of corporate enterprises and the monitoring of their employees. Specifically, it addresses employee network activities and penalties for violating acceptable usage policies. According to the survey, one third of companies surveyed have fired employees for misusing their internet access, and a quarter of them have canned people for abusing […]
By Mark O’Neill For the past few years, I’ve been using AVG Anti-Virus to keep my computer safe from viruses, but deep down, I’m a pretty paranoid kind of guy. Even if AVG gives a file the all-clear, I’m often left wondering, what if AVG is wrong? What if AVG was sleeping on the job […]
There are few people who work with the Internet who understand how truly vulnerable and weak the core infrastructure really is. Nothing demonstrates this basic weakness better than the troubles experienced by YouTube over the past weekend when Pakistan, under orders from its government, put new BGP (Border Gateway Protocol) entries in one of their […]
In this segment of The Real Hustle, Jess shows why you should never, ever dump important documents in the garbage / recycling bin without having fed them to the paper shredder first.
In my last post, I urged readers to patch weak applications. How do you know which ones to patch? The hard way to do it would be to go through your program files and open each application, check the version, and then see if there is an updated version at the vendor’s website. Or you […]
Love them or hate them, Microsoft has come a long way in making their Windows operating systems secure, mostly by employing built-in firewalls, default security settings and auto-patching features. Despite this, Windows is still the most-targeted operating system on the part of attackers, simply because it is the most ubiquitous. Now, instead of targeting flaws […]