As Hurricane Florence approaches, I thought I’d share my personal checklist for preparing for the power outage that often accompanies a big storm. This isn’t just for hurricanes, though. It can apply to snow or ice storms, too. These are storms where you have at least a few days to prepare and may lose power
If you have a combination printer/fax machine, your network is probably vulnerable to a single, malicious fax. A security research company named Check Point released a report last week that detailed how HP printers with built-in fax capability could be hacked by sending it a specially formatted fax. While the study focused on HP printers,
The Internet of Things (IoT) promises all sorts of cool new features for our previously "dumb" devices, allowing them to be controlled from anywhere on the planet. But because the compete on cost, security is lax or nonexistent. If you're going to bring these devices into your home, you need to keep them walled off.
Facebook, I’m breaking up with you… It’s not me… it’s you. In the last few weeks, Facebook has been rocked by one scandal after another. First the Cambridge Analytica thing, then the “Ugly Truth” memo, and then news that it’s been saving all your text messages and call info. But these are just the latest
Every new computer comes with one account, and most people never change that – but we all should. The default account on your computer is an administrator or “admin” account. This account has full permissions to do anything – which is convenient, but dangerous for daily use. One of the first things you should do
It’s that time of year again: tax time! And that means it’s also high season for identity thieves and scammers. Millions of people are affected by fake tax return filings every year. And while we’re talking about tax return fraud, we should take the opportunity to discuss some other tax and Social Security scams, as
Despite being available for seven years, less than 10% of Google users have taken advantage of two-factor authentication. This is according to Google engineer Grzegorz Milka, who quoted this figure at a recent tech conference. And yet, two-factor authentication (2FA) is probably the best option today for most people to lock down their online accounts.
I just read an entertaining and interesting story that was published about 16 years ago in Willamette Week, an indie newspaper in Portland, OR. This article was published shortly after 9/11 and the sweeping new government surveillance powers that came as a result. In particular, the article discussed a rather disturbing investigative technique used by
It’s been a pretty bad week for Apple software, both for their macOS computer software and their iOS smartphone and tablet software. But today I’m going to focus on a truly horrendous software bug that somehow slipped through Apple’s normally stellar quality control process. This one screw up could allow someone to quickly and easily
[Update 2019-04-07: While Quad9 is still a good option, you should check out Cloudflare’s 1.1.1.1 service which will come with a new free VPN service called Warp.] Evading malware can be difficult these days. The bad guys are very clever and surfing the Internet involves several complicated technologies. Software is rife with bugs and traps
