Public WiFi is ubiquitous. Pretty much anywhere you go these days, you’re going to find a free network you can connect to. Stop in to grab some coffee, free WiFi. Grab lunch at the restaurant downtown? Free WiFi. It’s everywhere, and that’s at least part of the problem.
The FBI has recently shut down a particularly nefarious ad server called the AdGholas group, which used a new and innovative method of infecting computers and managed to avoid detection for several months.
The hackers employed advanced steganography techniques via code embedded in graphics files, which marks the first time in history that malware has been served via steganography techniques.
Video streaming services like Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu Plus, and others are becoming so ubiquitous that they’re a fixture in everyday life for tens of millions of people. Unfortunately, hackers have proven incredibly adept at taking well known, popular trends and turning them against us.
So what do you do when you offer an unlimited data plan and people actually take you up on your offer? Well, if you’re Verizon, you start banning them.
Currently, Verizon is offering an “unlimited” plan. The problem, however, is that if you use large amounts of data, they’ll kick you off the network, and when you rejoin, you’ll find that you no longer have the option to sign up for the unlimited account.
According to security company Infoblox, a staggering 83% of the networks they’ve studied contain some form of malicious activity. The news is as staggering as it is grim, but if there’s a silver lining to be found in the report, it is that the company has broken out the biggest and most commonly found threats.
The annual “Cost of a Data Breach” study has been released, and the results aren’t pretty or encouraging. Between 2013 and now, the total cost to a company hit by a data breach is a staggering $4 million, which is a nearly 30% increase over the last three years.
System administrators have their hands full dealing with “Leap Seconds,” the extra second periodically added to the day by scientists working with UTC (Coordinated Universal Time), used by computer systems around the world. These leap seconds are necessary in order to keep clocks in step with the earth’s gradually slowing rotation.
Do you consider yourself to be a power user, where computers are concerned? Do you have one or more members of your staff you’d put in that category? If the answer to either of those questions was yes, then Seagate’s new Barracuda Pro desktop drive is almost certain to make you smile.
If your company deals with protected health information, then you know what a maze of regulation HIPAA rules can be. The Federal government has recently signaled just how seriously they take data breaches, by fining Oregon Health & Science University $2.7 million for two breaches that impacted a total of 7,066 individuals.
If you use Microsoft OneDrive, it’s time to review your usage rate, and perhaps start thinking of switching to a different cloud-based storage solution.
When the service was first rolled out, users with a free OneDrive account got fifteen gigabytes of storage space.
