According to Google's support page on the matter, disabling your phone's "Location History" in your phone's privacy settings will prevent Google from tracking every move you make. The support page reads as follows: "You can turn off Location History at any time. With Location History off, the places you go are no longer stored." That doesn't leave much in the way of wiggle room. A pity it's not even close to being true. A new investigation conducted by the Associated Press reveals … Read more
Survey Shows People Are Most Concerned About Data Theft
How seriously does the average consumer take data theft? It's an interesting (and fair) question, and one that Radware recently attempted to answer when the company sent out surveys. They contacted more than three thousand people to conduct its recent survey titled "Consumer Sentiments: Cybersecurity, Personal Data and the Impact on Customer Loyalty." As it turns out, today's consumers take the matter even more seriously than many other types of crimes. Here are some of the highlights … Read more
Reddit Users Advised To Reset Their Passwords
If you're a Reddit user, it's time to change your password. According to the company, they recently discovered evidence of a hack that exposed all company data from the site's launch (2005) to 2007, including user emails and account credentials. The company also reported that all public messages from that time period were downloaded, as well as an unknown number of private conversations. In addition to that, the hacker was apparently able to access the logs containing the email digests … Read more
Click Rates For Spam Emails Are Increasing
F-Secure recently published a new report, and their findings are disturbing. The click rates on spam emails increased to 14.2 percent for the second half of 2017, up from 13.4 percent reported in the first half of 2017. The increase seems to be driven by two factors. First, more intense targeting of smartphone users, who are typically more distracted and not paying as much attention when opening and reading emails. Second, a slight increase in sophistication. For instance, an email … Read more
New Scam Targets Apple Users
There's a new, surprisingly elaborate phishing scam targeting iPhone users. The scam starts with an email informing users that their phones have been locked due to "illegal activity" and instructing them to call "Apple Care" to get the problem fixed. Of course, there is no such company as Apple Care, but it's an official enough sounding name that it's luring a surprising percentage of victims into calling. In fact, opening the email will open a call dialog box, making connecting to "help" a … Read more
Connecting To Aiport Wi-Fi Puts Your Data At Risk
File this away under things you already knew. Coronet recently released a report entitled "Attention All Passengers: Airport Networks Are Putting Your Devices & Cloud Apps At Severe Risk," and the news is about what you'd expect. The report was more than five months in the making. The analysts poured over oceans of data on device vulnerabilities and Wi-Fi network risks from more than a quarter of a million consumer and corporate endpoints that passed through the 45 busiest airports in … Read more
E-Mail Is A Big Threat To Your Organization
Mimecast's 2018 "State of Email Security" report is out, and although it's contents are hardly a surprise, the news it contains is mostly bad. For starters, it confirms what most IT professionals already know: Email continues to be a big threat for organizations of all sizes. Unfortunately, the C-Suite (CEO's, CIO's, CFO's, and the like) are a major part of the problem, representing a significant weak link in Enterprise security. Not only are they a prime target for hackers, but … Read more
Bluetooth Vulnerability Allows Hackers To Access Devices
There's a new Bluetooth security vulnerability to be aware of, tracked as CVE-2018-5383, and it's a nasty one. It's a cryptographic vulnerability that affects firmware or operating system software drivers from a number of major vendors, including Qualcomm, Broadcom, Intel and Apple. At this point, the implication of the bug on Linux, Android, and Google are unknown. The flaw is related to two important Bluetooth features: BR/EDR implementations of Secure Simple Pairing in device firmware … Read more
New Report Shows 32 Percent Increase In Cyber Attacks
Positive Technologies has just released a new report that paints a grim picture for IT professionals. If your sense is that the number of cyberattacks are increasing, you're not wrong. In fact, it's probably worse than you realize. So far this year, we've seen a staggering 32 percent increase in the total number of cyberattacks in the first quarter of 2018, compared to the same period last year. Even worse, malware attacks have increased by a mind-bending 75 percent since the first quarter of … Read more
Survey Shows Businesses Feel Prepared For A Data Breach
A majority of business owners from around the world (68 percent) feel that they're better prepared to ward off a cyberattack and prevent a data breach than their competitors. This is a figure which is up 8 percent over last year's statistic for the same question. This, according to a recent survey by FICO. In the US, power and industrial companies were the most confident, with 86 percent of companies from these sectors rating their firms as either above average, or top-tier in terms of their … Read more
