If you use Apple products, you may have noticed an annoying "feature". If you're using the messaging app on your phone and texting someone and then you move to your Mac and access the same program there, the conversation you were having on your phone isn't present. The two devices are messaging islands that can't reliably communicate with each other. Since they can't, you can't start a conversation on one device and then pick it up later on another. True, Apple fans have found workarounds … Read more
Passwords May Be Dead Soon If Microsoft Gets Its Way
Karanbir Singh (a program manager at Microsoft) is on a mission: Kill the password. As he said in a recent blog post: "Nobody likes passwords. They are inconvenient, insecure, and expensive. In fact, we dislike them so much that we've been busy at work trying to create a world without them--a world without passwords." The company's stated goal is to make it possible that an end user will never have to bother with passwords on a day to day basis and would instead provide credentials … Read more
Coca Cola Breach Proves Employees May Be Significant Threat
Coca-Cola is the latest company to fall victim to a data breach. Unlike some of the others that have recently made headlines, however, this one was conducted from within. In September 2017, an employee at one of the company's subsidiaries stole an external hard drive containing personal data belonging to more than 8,000 company employees. Law enforcement officials notified the company when the drive was confiscated, but urged them not to make a public announcement regarding the incident … Read more
Now Is A Good Time To Upgrade To SSD Drives
If you've been considering swapping out some of your old HDDs to SSDs, now is a great time to do so, thanks to the convergence of two factors. First is the fact that the manufacturers of SSDs have been making strides in terms of increasing the capacity of the drives they're offering. They are doing this while simultaneously offering other enhancements that reduce data duplication, making their products faster and more efficient than their HDD counterparts. Second is the fact that there is … Read more
New Vulnerability May Expose Encrypted Emails
Security researchers at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) have discovered a dangerous new email vulnerability called "Efail." Exploiting this new email vulnerability would allow hackers to decrypt emails encrypted with either PGP or S/MIME - including emails that were sent several years earlier. Both of these encryption tools are commonly used by politicians, journalists and other professionals who need a secure means of electronic communication. Since the standards are so well … Read more
SSD Drive Makers Adding Features To Reduce Duplicate Data
Big changes are in the works in the SSD-based storage ecosystem. It includes three different vendors all making similar announcements regarding designs to help companies that rely on SSD-based storage systems to reduce duplication and control data creep. It's not hard to see why they're scrambling. Although the price of SSD-based storage systems are coming down, it's a slow process. Currently, a gigabyte's worth of SSD storage costs about forty cents, versus about five cents per gigabyte of … Read more
Chili’s Is The Latest To Suffer A Credit Card Breach
Brinker International (the parent company of the Chili's restaurant chain) formally announced that on May 11, they discovered malware on an undisclosed number of their point of sales terminals. Details are sketchy at this point, because the investigation is still ongoing, but the company had the following to say about the incident: "If you used your payment card at a Chili's restaurant between March and April 2018, it does not mean you were affected by this incident. However, out of an … Read more
Vega Stealer Malware Goes After Your Saved Credentials
There's a new security threat to be worried about, and security professionals are warning that it could be very bad indeed. The new malware is known as the "Vega Stealer," and is currently being used in a relatively simplistic phishing campaign designed to harvest financial data that has been saved in both Google Chrome and Firefox browsers. Unfortunately, based on an analysis of the code, it could be a much more serious threat. Vega Stealer isn't 100 percent original work, but rather, is a … Read more
Your Kids’ Personal Info May Have Been Compromised
An identity threat company called 4iQ has recently published a report called "Identities in the Wild: The Tsunami of Breached Identities Continues." Unfortunately, the information in the report contains all bad news. Some of the details are simply confirmations of things we already knew, and some are shocking statistics that will leave you feeling dismayed. For instance: Cybercriminals and hackers are getting increasingly sophisticated - This isn't new, but it's even worse than that. … Read more
Hulu To Soon Offer Episode Downloading and Offline Streaming
Hulu recently announced that it would join both Netflix and Amazon Prime in allowing its users to download content to watch offline, but in Hulu's case, it comes with a twist. If you subscribe to the $7.99 a month tier, in addition to downloading the content you want to watch, you'll also be downloading the advertising associated with that content. It's an important distinction because Hulu is structured quite differently from Netflix and Amazon Prime. Much of Hulu's programming is … Read more
