Here’s the reason that you should use a strong password for your webmail account. You may think those who may have personal reasons to want to get into your email account don’t have the sophistication to hack it, but they don’t need any hacking skills at all – they just need $100. Think about it [...]

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While starting my own business, I was struggling for weeks setting up our new IT system. Eventually, on Christmas Eve 2003, I gave in and Googled those guys who drive around in red VWs. Much to my relief (and surprise), I received a response the same day and my problem was sorted out in minutes! [...]

For a little over a year I have been working with a client, Sherry, who publishes a local magazine, AirdrieLIFE.  I first met Sherry at a Chamber of Commerce event.  I was very fortunate to be included in an article about local entrepreneurs last fall.  The article was a great source of PR for my [...]

Spyware comes in many forms, and spyware writers are always looking for new ways to take advantage of the unwary. This one masquerades as a plugin for Firefox. This is not malware of the botnet or password-stealing variety, but is does capture search data – and that is definitely spying. There are still quite a [...]

Thanks to Alex Brown, who was the first to point this out to me. I also see that Jeremy Laughlin picked up on the story and sent out an email. It appears that a couple of Japanese researchers have taken previous attacks on WPA and applied them to a MITM (Man In The Middle) technique [...]

I am often asked by clients about the economics of viruses, spyware, and botnets, so here are a couple articles that may help us all understand the financial incentives of getting malware onto computers: This article provides a little insight into the wold of botmasters. Cisco researchers managed to infiltrate this world by going undercover. [...]

This is an issue that affects pretty much all Linux distribution released since 2001 (2.4 and 2.6 kernels). It allows local users with limited privileges to escalate their privileges to root level by initializing a socket or by invoking certain protocols. Exploits are publicly available. This exploit requires local console access and does NOT allow [...]

Beware the “clampi” virus: Some malware, such as “scareware” steals money in small amounts from a lot of people, but the most pernicious malware is capable of stealing a lot of money from one victim – as in emptying a bank account. The clampi virus is an example. It is very stealthy and seems to [...]