On the heels of the FBI’s dustup with Apple Computer, the Judiciary committee of the U.S. House of Representatives has advanced a bill to the full chamber that would give cloud-stored data and emails more than 180 days old some much needed protection from law enforcement searches.
Windows XP was, by any measure, the most successful and ubiquitous operating system of all time. To this day, now two years after Microsoft formally ended support for the platform, there are still tens of millions of computers running XP. Fully, this is approximately 10.9% of the PCs on the planet.
Here’s the hard reality: Even if you devote sufficient resources to get the best security money can buy to protect your business from hackers, you might still be at risk. The reason? Well, in addition to the fact that there’s no such thing as security that a determined hacker can’t breach, there’s the simple fact that your security protocols aren’t the only ones in play during the conduct of your business.
Are you, or is someone you know a driver for Uber? Have you used the rideshare service to get from Point A to Point B? If the answer to either of these questions is yes, then odds are good that at least some of your information has been shared with a variety of government agencies.
When you surf the web, do you use a VPN (Virtual Private Network)? More than half a billion of the web’s users do, which is about a quarter of the web’s population, so you may be one of them. If you’re not, you should consider it, because it makes your browsing experience safer and more secure.
Google takes security more seriously than most companies, and it’s no wonder, given that the company’s Android Operating System is currently in use by more than 1.4 billion users worldwide. The latest version of Android (version 6.0, dubbed Marshmallow) includes such things as support for fingerprint scanners, a built-in patch level checker, verified boot functionality, full disk encryption and more granular app permissions, all of which are regarded as huge steps forward where security is concerned.
If you have a Windows-based PC (and you probably do), then you’ve almost certainly had the dubious honor of seeing the dreaded BSOD, or Blue Screen of Death. Unfortunately, since the first appearance of that screen, it has had a history of being less than helpful.
Remember the good old days, when all Adware did was make your web browsing experience inconvenient by bombarding you with annoying popups? Sadly, those days appear to be over. There’s a new generation of Adware that goes far, far beyond that.
Recently, a particularly nasty variant called VLMiner was found.
So, it turns out that the “Badlock” Samba exploit wasn’t quite as bad as it was originally cracked up to be. If you haven’t heard of Badlock, you’re not alone. It made the rounds in Internet security circles, but wasn’t widely publicized because it is a fairly specific, narrow threat, unlike some of the other broad spectrum security flaws we’ve seen in recent months.
