News
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…
Read MoreCould 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…
Read MoreDon’t ignore that e-mail from Lynda.com
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…
Read MoreYahoo! 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…
Read MoreDo you own a Netgear router? If so, you may have a serious vulnerability.
If you have one of the following Netgear router models, you could be exposed to a serious vulnerability: R6250 R6400 R6700 R7000 R7100LG R7300 R7900 R8000
Read MoreThere is a lot of variations in scam e-mail the last couple of days.
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…
Read MoreIf you have Adobe Flash Player installed, read this now.
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…
Read MoreThe 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…
Read MoreDetails emerge about the huge internet attack last Friday.
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…
Read MoreHave 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…
Read MoreHere 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…
Read MoreSnail mail delivers USB keys … WTF?
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…
Read MoreA desktop/laptop killing USB device is on sale for €50.
As I’d mentioned in the detail section of a previous blog post there was a prototype USB memory stick that is designed to fry the electronics on a laptop or desktop, the instant it gets plugged into it. Well it’s now something you can buy for as little as €50. The worrying thing is, as…
Read MoreProtect your on-line accounts, but not with text messages.
As I outlined here, if you are using on-line accounts for e-mail, social media, etc. then one of the strongest means of protecting yourself from the evil doers is to use, what is called, two factor authentication. If you are not doing this now, you really should be as it improves your protection massively. This is…
Read MoreRepeat after me … Microsoft do NOT e-mail out system updates! It’s Fantom Ransomware.
More evil e-mail is coming to scramble all the files on your computer and then demand you to pay your hard earned cash in order to get back access to same. In other words you are being held to Ransom and so we get the term Ransom Software or Ransomware for short and this new…
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