Despite our desires, hacking happens every day. It’s quickly becoming the most widespread crime in the world as far as reach with over half a billion victims last year. Sometimes there are no ways to completely prevent getting hacked, but there are definitely ways to make it harder.
This infographic from BotRevolt comes to us from Visually and breaks down some basic information about hacking.
In the race to the starting line, BlackBerry pulled out all the stops in order to deliver an app library that's 70,000 strong, but now the firm's looking to Trend Micro in an effort to keep malicious software at bay. Specifically, the phone maker will begin scanning all current and future BlackBerry World apps with the Trend Micro Mobile Application Reputation Service, a cloud-based solution that'll exist alongside BlackBerry's current security measures. In addition to scanning the code of an app, the service will watch for fishy behavior such as excess battery drain and abnormal resource consumption.
Alongside this announcement, BlackBerry also hinted about a service from Trend Micro that scans URLs, emails and files for potential threats. It's currently unclear whether implementation of this service would require some form of software update, but given the privacy implications at play, it'll be interesting to learn whether end users can disable the feature. Power to the people, right?
Twitter has been hacked. If you have a Twitter account (and who doesn't these days), it's probably a good idea to make sure everything is in order and/or reset your password with something strong. Twitter says that approximately 250,000 users may have been affected by the hack, with the hackers gaining access to usernames, email addresses, session tokens and encrypted version of passwords. Not good.
Twitter discovered "unusual access patterns" this past week that led it to identify unauthorized access attempts to Twitter accounts. They shut one live attack down but discovered that around 250,000 users may have been compromised. Twitter says...
Mobile devices and smartphones are still new ideas in the tech community. Compared to home computers and laptops, the common mobile smartphone has only been around for a couple of years now. But having quickly grown to popularity, there are more early adopters now than we have ever seen before.
When I started my own design business, one of the first things I put in place was a well-written contract. Before I spoke to an attorney about drafting an official document for me, I made sure I had my design process established.
I also did a lot of research as to what other design firms and freelancers were including in their agreements. With something as subjective as design, there are lots of gray areas that need to be clarified as much as possible on paper.
If you’re in the process of drafting a client contract, or if you are considering revising one that already exists, I would recommend including the following list of items...
Websites of all kinds are targeted by malicious attackers on a daily basis. The potential damages caused by these activities can range from the mild annoyance of spam to total loss of data. Website owners are not defenseless against these things; there are simple and effective ways to better protect your site against spam, viruses and hacker intrusion attempts.
The Internet is a dangerous, virus-infested place. Today's most popular Web browsers claim they are chock full of protections to keep you safe.
Some of the browser vendors get a little testy about each others' proclamations about who can protect you better.
For instance, Microsoft loves to tout a quarterly security shootout, performed by NSS Labs, which tends to find a weakness in its competitor's browsers. Its latest found that Internet Explorer's security blocked 95 percent of the bad stuff on the Web while Chrome blocks 33 percent, and Safari and Firefox block less than 6 percent.
It's easy to forget about computer security. Unfortunately, by the time you realize there's a problem with your computer, you could be in deep trouble.
Most users recycle the same passwords, never update their computer's software, and, worst of all, don't back up.
Take a few minutes out of your day and educate yourself on how a firewall works, what Java is and how to disable it, and a few other measures you can take to increase your computer's security.
A US federal appeals court has given the green light for warrantless wiretapping. That means federal government can now spy on communications between America citizens without any warrants—and without fear of being sued, either.
We've been reeling a bit ever since Mat Honan was the victim of that ruthless social hack that wiped all his devices. Sure, that was an extreme case. But it's also one that could happen to anyone, at any time. So we put together a list of the best ways to make sure your internet self—your accounts, your cash, and your information—stays secure.
Over the weekend, WIRED editor (and former Gizmodo writer), Mat Honan was viciously hacked.
The hacker was able to wipe his iPhone and iPad and access both his personal Twitter account and Gizmodo's Twitter account.
Honan wasn't really at fault either, Apple was. The iPhone maker's Apple Care support let an individual reset Honan's password over the phone, resulting in a domino effect that quickly ruined the writer's weekend.
We wouldn't blame you if you were worried about being hacked after Honan's nightmare, so we came up with a few ways to protect yourself...
Being no.1 in a specific field is difficult and no matter the conditions, it requires sacrifices. Nonetheless, it’s ten times more complicated to keep yourself in a leading position. The same idea may be applied to any website, with a good advertising campaign and just a little bit of good luck it may become the favorite of readers and search engine spiders’. The website monitoring and maintenance is a very challenging matter and paradoxically, people and even specialists usually ignore it. Many people interested in having a cool website invest a good amount of money in designing it believing that is just enough. Unfortunately, the launching of a website is only the tip of the iceberg; having a good maintenance is the solution to keep visitors coming back to see the novelties. Google appreciates the trend of being merely under changes, therefore here is another important reason to pay attention to the maintenance of your website.
According to LookOut, a company that makes security apps for mobile devices, in-app advertising is becoming overly aggressive and sometimes even crossing the line over to spyware.
Anyone that has an Android or Apple device is probably familiar with ad-support apps. At one time it was no big deal, just a small banner ad at the bottom or top of the screen. These days it’s gone much further. Some in-app ad networks push ads to your device’s notification tray, shove icons on to your homescreen, and even change your ringtone to a commercial! There are also some mobile ad networks that collect far more personal info than you think, including your phone number, location, mobile provider, and device IMEI and model number, and almost all of them are a drain on your battery.
It looks like LinkedIn isn’t the only company dealing with password woes as of late.
Just one day after it was reported that 6.5 million LinkedIn user passwords were dumped onto the web, London-based music recommendation network Last.fm has just recently announced on their website that they too are “investigating the leak of some Last.fm user passwords.”
Though the company didn’t disclose how many users were affected by the issue or how the leak occurred, they still asked users to change their passwords just to be safe. At this point, it’s unknown how secure those leaked passwords actually are — LinkedIn caught some flack for storing user passwords as unsalted SHA-1 hashes, a practice they claimed they recently amended.
On the Internet, every site you visit is recorded. There are tools to help block this act, but what does it really mean to be tracked on the Web? And what types of information do companies have about you?
Tools by Disconnect literally "disconnect" you from Facebook, Google and Twitter so that these major sites don't keep track of your browsing. A new tool called Collusion for Chrome shows users all the websites that secretly track you as you browse the Web. How do these tools work, and what are the advantages to using them? There is a hope that one day, our Web life will be private again.
Two months ago, a new variant of the Flashback Trojan started exploiting a security hole in Java to silently infect Mac OS X machines. Apple has since patched Java, but this was only yesterday. As of today, more than 600,000 Macs are currently infected with the Flashback Trojan, which steals your user names and passwords to popular websites by monitoring your network traffic.
Frequent Facebook users have a love-hate relationship with the world's largest social network. It's hard not to worry about how Facebook is using the information we so freely feed it, yet the platform itself is so fun and enjoyable to use, oftentimes it's easier to overlook the bigger privacy picture for in-the-moment fun. Parents share images of their kids with friends and distant relatives. Artists trade links and images on Facebook, collaborating and curating ideas and interests. Yet the social networking comes with a price, as evidenced by the controversy caused by the Girls Around Me App, which uses public Foursquare and Facebook location data to map women nearby. And of course, it's easier to freak out about apps like this than to seriously consider what dumping your personal information onto Facebook itself means.
Every day the Internet is becoming a more ingrained part of preteens' lives, especially preteens who haven't yet hit Facebook's 13-years-old age requirement. How can parents get an idea of what their kids are doing online while still engendering an environment of love and trust? Much of this relies on parents being open with kids about types of acceptable online behaviors, but it's also important for parents to teach kids the general rules for online safety.
It sounded like a bargain to Carolyn Soucy: for just $1, she could get a copy of her credit report. No strings attached.
Except that there was a string or two. She was actually signing up for a $14.95 membership in a program that monitored her credit unless she canceled within seven days – something disclosed (though not clearly) online.
On a recent business trip, en route to Dallas from Atlanta, my iPhone went missing.
The woman at the airport lost-and-found reassuringly told me that my loss was a “hot item” and I shouldn’t expect it to turn up. She was right. Unfortunately the case carrying my phone also included my charge, debit, and business cards. After the incident my colleague tells me she has photocopies of all of her cards and ID on her computer in case she loses anything. She then admits that she only has one password for most of her accounts, so if someone had that then they’d have most of her personal information.
