NEWS
Money draining…
Do you hear that? The sound of drip... drip... drip...? It's the sound of money ever so gradually leaving your account through insecure transactions. There are these clever little ways to send money through text messaging - Yele does it to help humanitarian aid after...
Authenticating Mobile Apps
Everyone is excited about the new Google phone - Nexus One. I am actually considering making the jump from iPhone to an Android-based phone. The Android Market is the Google’s answer to iTunes App store. In an interesting twist of events, a rogue app called “Droid09”...
5 Security Threats Expected in 2010
Is anyone really surprised that two of the top security threats expected in 2010 have to do with social engineering and mobile media? Hackers live in the same world we do, and they naturally gravitate toward any media that is widely used. As social networking becomes...
The Problem with Passwords
Zack Whittaker’s post on whether we still need usernames/passwords is fueling an interesting debate at ZDNet. The premise is familiar - everyone is tired of storing their hundreds of passwords in an Excel sheet or a password management app. Wouldn’t it be nice if...
Why try to remember what you could just write down?
The quip at the bottom of this password worksheet is priceless. Why try to remember what you could just write down? The sad thing is that there are actually products like this still out there, encouraging people to write down and maintain a paper trail of their...
Keyloggers: You can’t touch this!
The FBI is advising small businesses - the same ones often operating on a shoestring - to use a dedicated PC for their online banking. It would seem that hackers are targeting small businesses, universities, and local businesses with keylogging malware - that is,...
5 reasons you don’t know you’re being phished
We all think we're pretty observant people. We notice things that are important to us - a friend's new shoes, the boss' new briefcase. If we sit down with one of those "Spot the difference" puzzles we can find 5 things. In our own minds, we can all spot a criminal, a...
Security may not be colorblind
Making it to the top of the BBC Technology page, a video posted on YouTube shows how the latest HP face recognition technology fails to “see” a black person. The video is pretty funny to watch. Have you seen it? If not, here it is for your viewing pleasure. In light...
Just a Blip(py) on the Radar?
We're thinking Blippy may be just a proverbial blip on the radar. The passive social networking site (meaning, it updates your status for you) tells your friends how much you're spending, and where. It updates a twitter-like status about your credit card purchases....
Visual passwords better than alphanumerics
Did you see this? Christian Harris put up a nice blog last week calling alphanumeric logins obsolete. Thanks for the shout-out Christian. The same article tells us that identity theft is up 33.1%, according to CIFAS, and that's before taking into account the increase...
Year-end musings
Don't you know that December is a great time to blog? There are end of year reviews, predictions for the next year, holiday hubub - this stuff nearly writes itself. Speaking of which, Earl Perkins at Gartner put up an interesting question the other week that prompted...
2009 trending into 2010
CA, Inc. issued a report last week detailing the top security threats of 2009, as well as predictions for 2010. What's surprising? Fake or rogue security software was the most prevalent threat of 2008. It seems criminals know that we as a population have a weakness...
Today’s bank: Dinosaur or Dancer?
The problem: banking websites, while highly useful and in fact necessary in today's virtual economy, are also highly vulnerable to fraudulent attacks. They could approach it the way AT&T did when they realized that 3% of users (iPhone owners) exploit 40% of...