The Dragon that Guards the Data: No Pet Names in Passwords!


Whether or not you use gmail, you should read this. The article is from Wordfence, which primarily does WordPress security, but they have previously published excellent work on other attacks, and every word of their advice is good. In particular, the advice to carefully read your address bar to make sure you are where you…
… consider yourself warned. I have encountered several machines recently on which people were either running without anti-virus protection or had allowed the anti-virus subscription to lapse, sometimes for long periods of time. I know it’s tempting to avoid that little expense, but the protection is critical. You also need to let those scans run,…
I’m actually announcing this somewhat late, but I am now an Avast Premier Partner, indicating that I have taken training in both sales and technical aspects of their software. I build my support for small businesses around their Managed Workplace and Cloudcare solutions, and use their end point security software. Considering that all my customers…
Several people have asked me very recently about scam emails. I don’t mind being asked, but there are some signs you should look at. I’m going to include a partial screenshot here. Here are several key signs: Lousy grammar. I’ve underlined a couple of items. Valid emails can have grammatical errors, but this sounds like…
They’ve laid out the critical data in a post titled Election Hack Report FAQ. This report includes clarifying that, despite their headline, they were not claiming that the report truly traced the hacking to Russia. I thought that was pretty clear in the first place, but I suppose “headline only” readers (not my favorite people),…
There’s a story on MSNBC.com about a security vulnerability discovered in DNS servers. Those are the machines that take the name you type into your address bar and convert it into numbers your computer can comprehend. If it converts it into the wrong set of numbers, you go to the wrong place. It would be…