There are two parts to every login: a user name and a password. We in the security community talk a lot about the password part. But that’s because we usually take the user name part for granted. Today, user names are almost always your email address. You probably only have one of those, maybe two. …
The gift-giving season is nigh, along with all the “Black Friday” sales. So it’s once again time for my annual gift guide for products you should consider or avoid if you care about security and privacy. Overview Companies are scrambling to make all of our devices “smart”. The first push was connecting everything to the …
Connecting all our stuff to the internet – making devices “smart” – brings with it a lot of risks. Besides the more obvious cybersecurity vulnerabilities, these devices are also collecting a lot of personal data, offsetting razor thin profit margins by monetizing our data. In most cases, we can limit this data exfiltration using outbound …
Email has been around for literally decades. But security and privacy were not included in the original design. There are several solutions to this oversight, but one stands out for me. I firmly believe you should try Proton. Privacy Not Included Email as we know it today was first developed in the 1990s, using open …
October is Cybersecurity Awareness Month and one of the themes this year is Recognize & Report Phishing. I also just had an informative interview with Nick Oles on phishing based on his book, “How to Catch a Phish“. So let’s do a quick refresher on how to spot and handle a phishing scam. Catch a …
Apple’s iOS 17, released last week, contains several interesting privacy and security features. Here’s a quick overview. Lockdown Mode Apple introduced Lockdown Mode in iOS 16 which was designed to protect iPhones against “extremely rare and highly sophisticated cyber attacks”. While Apple didn’t mention the NSO Group’s Pegasus by name, they did say that the …
[This is the 4th and final part of a series – part 1, part 2, part 3] You’ve made it to the fourth and final step in our quest to secure your home network! So far, we’ve done the following: The final step is to actually Remediate any issues we found. That’s the subject of …
[This is the 3rd in a 4-part series – part 1, part 2, part 4] At this point, we’ve done a thorough inventory of our network devices (Scan) and we’ve taken the opportunity to get rid of any devices that we no longer need or at least disabled the smart features if we don’t need …
It’s been a crazy busy week, and I’m going to have to hit the easy button for this one. I’ll return to my series on protecting your home network next time. Instead, I’ll give you a little taste of what I saw at “hacker summer camp” 2023. I attended both BSides Las Vegas and DEF …
[This is the 2nd in a 4-part series – part 1, part 3, part 4] At this point, we’ve tackled maybe the hardest part of improving the security of our home network: we’ve enumerated all the smart devices connected to our router. Before we go any further, we should stop and take the opportunity to …
