These little gizmos are fabulous, aren’t they? They make it so easy to carry around everything you could ever need, in some cases even a whole operating system! I have some very geeky friends who have some distribution of Linux on a flash drive, and all they have to do is plug it into some computer somewhere and they have […]
6 Things You Should Know About Flash Drives
The Top Things to Do To Avoid Malware
As a tech professional, it’s my job to clean up after computer “accidents.” But a more important aspect of my job is keeping them from happening. There is a lot of information on the web directed at cyber safety, and most of it is good. But there is one thing that you can do more to keep you safe than any other […]
Critical Information on New Ransomware
Embed from Getty Images Hot off the press, there’s a new version on ransomware that is cheaper to unlock, and there’s bad news and more bad news. Yes, they charge only a portion of a bitcoin to get the key to unlock the files they’ve encrypted. Except that they haven’t encrypted them. They’ve actually deleted the files. So if you […]
The Math Behind a Good Password
Embed from Getty Images This post is actually a preface to another one I’m in the middle of right now, on password managers. But I wanted to take a minute and explain why your workplace insists on bizarre passwords, and how you can capitalize on that in your personal life. Why are there password requirements? When you have to change […]
Are You Safe Using Snapchat?
The process of writing this article was much more educational than I anticipated. I started out to write about a breach of Snapchat usernames and phone numbers, so I could warn readers about using this service. Then I found out about the photo leaks—and more. I also found a significant amount of naiveté demonstrated by some of the bloggers who […]
Limit Your Exposure
Unless you always save to your external drive or your mapped drive on your home server, you might consider disconnecting when not in use. The encrypting malware is getting really sophisticated and extends its reach to your mapped drives. That means if your offsite online backup solution operates as a mapped drive, your safety net could become no more useful […]
Sometimes It’s the Little Things
…or, in this case, the Itty Bitty. I get my news and information from a wide variety of sources: websites, newsletters, YouTube channels, and podcasts, primarily. Today’s media content lends itself well to consumer contribution, and that increases the value of each medium as well as each producer. I currently follow 17 podcasts, and the only reason I can do […]
…and from the “whatever happened to” department…
Just about a year ago, the Infotech security space was all ablaze with noise about this thing called “BadBIOS.” This was a scary bug, for several reasons. First, it was new, which meant that before the security researchers could come up with the cure for it, it could do a lot of damage; but that’s not unique. Second, it had […]
Is Your Heart Bleeding?
What have you heard about the vulnerability called Heartbleed? More than you wanted to? Less than you needed to? Let me unpack it for you, only the part that you need to know, and then I’ll get a little deeper for those who want to stick around for the full meal. Let’s do a Good News/Bad News thing. What […]
You Can’t Just Surf Anymore
It never was really safe to just surf around and clickety-click on interesting-looking stuff, but it just keeps getting truer and truer (is that grammatically correct?) that you have got to pay attention to what you’re doing on the web. You’ve got to pay attention when you get an email with a link or an attachment. (See Cryptolocker) You’ve got […]