Archive for November 2016

Tech giants Google and Microsoft are at odds, thanks to a recent announcement made by Google about a vulnerability in Windows’ Operating System. Google’s longstanding policy has been to inform the company that owns the software when a security flaw is found. Google’s thresholds are seven days for an announcement, and ten days for a…

No matter how good, expensive or robust your security system is, your employees are always the weakest link. In fact, in some cases, your own policies might be pushing them to “rational noncompliance,” a situation in which your employees break the rules in order to make their jobs easier. The statistics are alarming. According to…

This is how something as innocuous as a thumb drive can become a major security issue. Recently, it has come to light that a soon-to-be retiring regulator at the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) had downloaded work files onto a thumb drive, but now, seems to have misplaced it. The files were…

What percentage of your employees know how to properly handle sensitive information? The answer is “probably a lot less than you think.” In a recent survey conducted by MediaPro, it was discovered that nearly 90% of employees lacked security and privacy awareness. Only 12% of respondents knew how to properly identify and dispose of information…

A new FCC ruling changes the game for Internet Service Providers around the country, which limits their ability to share or sell the information they have on the people who use their services. The new rules were approved in a 3-2 vote, with the three Democratic committee members approving the changes and the two Republican…

Researchers at a cyber security company called EnSilo have found a new vulnerability in Windows PCs, and it’s about as bad as it could possibly get. The new attack vector does not exploit a bug in the code, but rather, the design of the OS itself, which uses Atom Tables to store data that’s being…

Vine, one of the many properties owned by Twitter, is dead, after the company tried unsuccessfully to find a buyer for the struggling service. If you’re a Vine regular, you’ve probably sensed the move coming for quite some time. As part of Twitter’s constellation of products, it was one service among many, and never really…

There’s a new viral link making the rounds on Twitter that you should advise your staff to steer clear of. If you see a link that begins with “goo.gl,” don’t click it. If you do, not only will it crash your Twitter app if you’re on your smartphone, but after it does that, it will…

It has been widely reported that cybercrime is one of the fastest growing types of crime on the planet today, but new statistics published by MarkMonitor’s Online Fraud Barometer indicate that it’s a lot worse than previously imagined. Close to half (45%) of all consumers have, at some point, fallen victim to cybercriminals. Fraud is…

If you’re a VDSL user, there’s good news on the horizon. Recently, Nokia has announced some amazing increases in its XG.fast speeds, achieving up to 5Gbps (about 625MB per second) over 70 meters of conventional copper telephone wire. That’s huge, but it gets even better. The company was also able to coax 8Gbps over 30…