If you're using an Apple device running iOS 11.0.3 or 11.1, you may have noticed some oddities when sending text messages. For reasons that aren't quite clear, the letter "I" is being replaced by the characters "A[?]." It's not a game-breaking bug, but it is annoying, and if you're not paying attention, it can make for some rather mystifying text messages. Fortunately, Apple is on the case, and the company has announced that they'll have a fix for the issue in their next release. If you'd … Read more
Archives for November 2017
How Safe is Your Password Really?
Imagine this: You're setting up your login information for your email, or maybe it's your Cloud database account. Upon entering your password, the program prompts you to include a capitalized letter, number and possibly a symbol in your password. You wonder, "Is this really necessary? Who's going to be THAT determined to break into my accounts?" Well to answer that question: hackers. Hackers are going to great lengths to recover your account login credentials. And as hackers develop more ways … Read more
Are Your Employees Wasting 3 Hours of Productivity?
Time is Money In the age of the Internet, instant information, social media, smart phones, tablets and much more, the business world has seen great leaps and strides in the ability to reach an audience, clients and customers, but at what cost? Well, it turns out that cost may come in the form of productivity in the work place, as recent research has shown that a majority of employees with access to the Internet are wasting between 1-3 hours surfing the web or checking their social media. Along … Read more
9 Steps to an Effective Cyber Security Plan
There is not a day that goes by that you do not read in the paper or hear on television that some company has been the victim of Cyber Crime. The alarming thing is that for every incident that you hear about there are probably six more that have happened that you don't hear about. There are many reasons why people don't report about breaches. Probably the biggest of which is the damage to their reputation and the cost of properly handling the situation. Ponemon Institute recently reported that … Read more
Cloud Computing – How Will it Affect You?
What is cloud computing? Cloud computing means storing and accessing data and programs over the Internet instead of your computer's hard drive. With an online connection, cloud computing can be done anywhere and anytime. We are always on the watch for the ‘next best thing’ when it comes to technology and the Internet. Certainly no one can doubt that the next generation of the Internet (known as Web 2.0) has had a dramatic affect on how people interact and connect with each other – both … Read more
Android Gets Fix For KRACK WiFi Vulnerability
Last month, a new WiFi security vulnerability known as "Krack" was discovered by a security researcher named Mathy Vanhoef. It was about as serious as a security flaw could be, enabling hackers to clone a router and funnel traffic through it, either monitoring all the activity on the network or, if they wanted to be more destructive, conducting all manner of "man in the middle" attacks against anyone on the network. The major tech companies were all given advance notice of Vanhoef's research, … Read more
Facebook Has A Major Problem With Fake Accounts
Facebook has been in hot water with evidence mounting that hordes of fake accounts were used to spread misinformation about the recent presidential election. In addition to sparking congressional hearings, it also prompted Facebook and the other major social media companies to do a deep dive into their own active accounts and get a better sense of just how large and pervasive the problem was. According to Facebook's most recent quarterly earnings report, the problem turned out to be a fair … Read more
Touch And Vibration May Be The Fingerprints Of The Future
Researchers at Rutgers University have hit upon a novel idea that could be a game-changer in terms of biometric identification. The team published a paper entitled "VibWrite: Towards Finger-input Authentication on Ubiquitous Surfaces via Physical Vibration," and demonstrated a prototype of the device at the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) conference in Dallas, Texas. The new technology is a lesson in simplicity, consisting of a simple vibration motor and a receiver on almost any … Read more
Report Shows Small Percentage Of Employees Know About Ransomware
The statistics are alarming. Ransomware is fast becoming the favored hobby horse of hackers worldwide. Barely a week goes by that a new strain isn't introduced into the wild, with expensive, and often tragic consequences. Right now, the average amount paid by office workers impacted by a ransomware attack is $1400, a figure that continues to creep higher. What's perhaps even more alarming, however, is the fact that although companies the world over have made a concerted effort to sound the … Read more
New Ransomware “BadRabbit” Starting To See Infections In The US
You may not have heard of the new strain of ransomware known as BadRabbit. If you haven't, it's because the overwhelming percentage of BadRabbit attacks have been occurring in Russia, which accounts for 71 percent of all known infections at present. Unfortunately, there have been a few infections reported in the United States, which may be a harbinger of things to come. The new threat is functionally similar to NotPetya, which not only encrypts the files on a target system but also then … Read more
