Krebs’s simple rules for online safety
On 2011/06/01
Brian Krebs writes about security. He has three rules for online safety that bear repeating.
If you didn’t go looking for it, don’t install it! If you installed it, update it. If you no longer need it, remove it.
If you want to understand more about these rules, the original post [...]
A client, who was recently scammed out of a significant amount of money via a stolen email account, received the following message, purporting to be from the FBI, this morning. It clearly is a continuation of the scam. Note the misspellings: they were in the original email:
[some information has been obscured]
From: JOHN [...]
Trust No One (TNO)
On 2011/05/08
Disclosures about major security breaches have dominated much of the tech news in the past few months. The trend seems to be growing, not abating. These are large, serious breaches that compromise security, confidential information and privacy for governments, corporations and individuals. In no specific order, there were the:
Ghostery is a good privacy tool for Windows and Macs
On 2011/02/28
Trying to protect our online privacy seems like a lost cause. There are tools we can deploy to defend our privacy as we surf the Internet.
One tool that almost all modern browsers have is privacy mode, which typically blocks your browser from retaining any local information about [...]
The Microsoft Windows team blogged about a fake version of Microsoft Security Essentials (MSE) that is in the wild. I have seen infected machines. The popup dialogs for the fake MSE look real (see image below). It is easy to be fooled into thinking this is a valid security [...]
It must take years of advanced linguistic training to become a Microsoft software engineer. During the training, one learns how to communicate with machines and other software engineers. Sometime late in the process it appears you lose the ability to communicate with anyone else.
A marvelous example of this effect appears in [...]
Safer ways to view Twitter
On 2010/05/17
Twitter limits posts to 140 characters. The good is that it forces us to be concise in our tweets. The bad is that we use URL shortening services like bit.ly or sn.im to save characters when we link to web pages. This is bad because we cannot see the [...]
Digital copiers are the new security fear
On 2010/04/25
All digital copiers made since 2002 use a hard drive to store information including copied images. So images of confidential documents are stored unsecured on these hard drives. This problem was revealed about two weeks ago by the CBS Evening News. This only applies to office-grade copiers. Your home all-in-one printer [...]
If you get the following pop-up dialog in Firefox go ahead and disable the plug-in and restart your browser. Palemoon is a custom-built and optimized for Windows Firefox derivative that I am testing.
If you do not want to wait for the popup, you can find out if this is installed in [...]
Make Adobe Reader and Acrobat more secure
On 2010/04/18
PDF files are increasingly used to spread malware like viruses, worms, trojans, spyware, and ransomware. Adobe Reader and its big brother Adobe Acrobat are found on almost every Windows machine and many Macs too. This makes PDFs a favorite vector of infection for the black hats (AKA the bad guys).
There are two changes you [...]
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