used with permission from the Microsoft Small Business Site Very few of us would hide our life savings under our mattress with confidence that those funds would remain safe and sound. Financial institutions provide us with a plethora of options for the...
The Internet search engine Shodan has made a splash by getting a spotlight on multiple blogs and sites like CNN this month. There is a lot of sniffing and crawling that happens on the internet; Shodan's niche is the darker side of the internet - sites that aren't...
Password Cracking I came across an article that has been making the rounds this past month that you can read here. It's the story of one editor's (Nate Anderson of Ars Technica) foray into password cracking and it can be very eye opening to the world of password...
We continue to note that Java vulnerabilities and patches continue to be discovered and issued at an alarming rate. Note that Java is different from Javascript. Javascript is very common and runs in your browser and is not subject to these...
One of the largest security stories this month came from the goliath book retailer, Barnes & Noble. In September, they found some of their credit card scanners - limited to one PIN pad at each of 63 stores in nine states - had been "bugged" and used to steal card...
For a long time only third party software existed to connect two networks via an encrypted connection (called Virtual Private Networking, or VPN). Microsoft introduced a built-in version of this technology into Windows Server, and its use became widespread. This...
In more recent security news - a database of 450,000 user names and passwords of Yahoo Voice users was stolen and produced to the internet. Unfortunately for Yahoo Voice's users, the passwords weren't encrypted. Lucky for us, Anders Nilsson, a Swedish security expert,...
Some Dropbox users started complaining that they had received spam to accounts created and used solely for Dropbox. Claims of spam sent to users started to mount and, as Dropbox didn't sell this user information, the first thought on everyone's mind was that Dropbox...
Researchers at AVG got an interesting visitor while analyzing a virus. The virus programmer popped in for a chat. In the AVG labs, they had installed a virus (that impostors itself as an instructional video for the new video game, Diablo 3) to take a look at what it...
Security researchers are trying to get the word out to mac users that the cat is out of the bag: Mac users need to be concerned with viruses as much as anyone else. April saw the largest saturation of mac virus activity ever witnessed, infecting an estimated 600,000...