Company that makes smart Teddy Bear’s leaked data.

Evil Teddy Bear

It has just been reported that up to 800,000 people who owned a Smart Teddy bear made by Spiral Toys, under the CloudPets banner have had their account data stolen by hackers. Now this blog is about this particular toy, but this could easily apply to other types of “smart toy” so do read on.…

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Scary new way to have your GMail password and account stolen.

This is an incredibly easy way for the evil doers to steal your GMail ID and GMail password. This one could even catch out security people like me! ? So what happens is you receive an e-mail from somebody you know, who also had a GMail (note the emphasis on had). 

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What will 2017 bring in Cyber Security?

5 Cyber Security Predictions for 2017 Lots of people do these type of lists, but since this is the end of my first year in business, I might as well be no different.? 1. Ransomware levels will plateau, but constantly change This might be an easy one to get right. Ransomware is already embedded in…

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Facebook Messenger scam … it’s nothing new, but it’s still effective.

I’ve seen evidence of this scam occurring amongst my Facebook friends this Christmas. It’s a straightforward phishing scam, where one of your friends sends you a Facebook Message with an apparent link to a video of you. Sometimes they might ask “Is this you?” or tell you to go a specific point in the video…

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Could the attempted theft of €4.3m from Meath County Council happen to your business?

As was widely reported at the weekend, Meath County Council were the victim of an attempted theft of some €4.3 million. A lot of the reportage was pointing to hackers and this being a cyber attack, but based on what is known, in my opinion, it’s not really. This attempted theft was facilitated by the…

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Don’t ignore that e-mail from Lynda.com

Lynda Hacked

I received two e-mails in recent days from online training provider Lynda.com customer care, this is because I have had two accounts with Lynda.com in the past. Both were set-up when they had a 30 day free trial offer, which I made use of. I’m one of the 9.5 million customers/former customers of Lynda.com who have…

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Yahoo! tries for new world record and wins … but it already had the world record!

You all heard the headlines during the year about the massive Yahoo! hack, where in late 2014, hackers had stolen the names, addresses, mobile telephone numbers, dates of birth, security questions and passwords of 500+ million accounts. This was a new world record for the amount of user accounts stolen on the internet. Well bless…

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There is a lot of variations in scam e-mail the last couple of days.

E-Mail Scam

I yearn for the days when evil e-mail was so easily identified “becuse it wuz ritten in, gud, inglish wit grate spellhng an pun.tation”. ? In the last couple of days, the evil doers have been varying their scam e-mails fairly wildly and it’s bound to catch out some people. I’ll run through three sneaky methods…

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If you have Adobe Flash Player installed, read this now.

Adobe Flash Player Vulnerability

I really HATE Adobe Flash player. ? It is the internet equivalent of Typhoid Mary. If you don’t need it, uninstall it. If you do need it, use Chrome as your browser. Why the rant? Adobe has released a Critical update to Flash Player because of a vulnerability with it that has already been exploited in targeted…

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The Internet of Evil Things continues to grow.

The first time I saw that picture of the Dr. Evil meme, I never thought that it might be possible for the numbers to reach those nonsensical values, but if Internet connected brooms are in our future (see below), we might be in serious trouble, if the manufacturers of such devices keep ignoring the need…

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Details emerge about the huge internet attack last Friday.

Attack of the IoT devices

I’m sure you’ve all heard about the internet attack in the US last Friday, where sites such as Twitter, Amazon, Spotify, PayPal and Netflix (amongst others) were taken offline (effectively). This was done by what is called a Distributed Denial Of Service (DDOS) attack and it targeted a company called Dyn, which provides all of…

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Have you any smart internet connected IoT devices in your home?

If so, you may be an unwilling accomplice to the evil doers who are attempting to disrupt the internet. Do you have any one or more of the following Internet of Things – IoT devices which you can access from outside the home, over the internet: Security Cameras or Digital Video Recorders (DVRs) Baby monitor…

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Here is a worrying aspect of the Yahoo breach.

Everyone has heard about the personal information related to 500 million Yahoo accounts being stolen from Yahoo in 2014. There’s lots of helpful tips out there (and some here too), but some people may not realise that they have a Yahoo account. Yahoo provides e-mail services to some big internet service providers (ISPs), over in…

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Snail mail delivers USB keys … WTF?

Bad USBs delivered by mail

I find I’m writing a second article about Evil USBs within a week. At least these ones don’t destroy your equipment, but they might infect you with nasty software that does things that you really wouldn’t want it doing. In this case, in Victoria, Australia, Evil Doers were dropping USB drives into people’s mailboxes. The…

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