You should be so .LOCKY !
I have seen this twice now in the past few weeks and – I’ll put money on it – no doubt I’ll be seeing it again soon. The scam I’m about to describe is called .LOCKY and it has already caused the permanent destruction of many millions of personal computer files around the world. Let me tell you why this is such a concern to me and why you need to know about this. Here’s how it works. Firstly, it has to find its way on to your computer. That is incredibly easy today. Despite all the warnings to the contrary, people still open email... Read more...
Why Strong Passwords Really Matter
The recent publicity surrounding A-list celebrities having private pictures from their iPhone put on public display for all to see, just serves to highlight once again the downside of the ‘Cloud Computing’ model we are all being encouraged to adopt. This was an iCloud hack, so the pictures were only accessible because the celebrities concerned had synchronised their iPhone with iCloud. But isn’t that what most of us do? That’s the whole point of it, isn’t it? The thing that they wouldn’t have known was that only 24 hours before the pictures... Read more...
Get used to it. This is the new normal
It seems to be impossible to read – or watch – the News these days without coming across some major new cyber-security warning urging you to take action now to protect your computer, or your data, or your money, or your identity, or something else, from imminent threat of theft, or worse. Now the problem is – the more you see these articles the more you just ignore them! This is because the threat is often described in technical language and it’s not clear what you are actually being asked to do or, you didn’t do... Read more...
Are your passwords strong enough?
It has been estimated that there were over 10 million victims of some kind of cyber fraud in the UK last year. Added together they may have lost between £600m and £800m. These are seriously large numbers and some authorities believe the problem is continuing to get worse. So, you should worry about this. You are not up against some 14-year-old kid in his bedroom in Russia trawling the Internet for unlucky punters to hack. No, this is organised crime and the syndicates involved are incredibly large and powerful. They are using millions of... Read more...
Heartbleed – Don’t Panic!
If you have read the press or listened to the news any time since Tuesday, you have probably heard of a new Internet security vulnerability called HeartBleed which the IT security industry has got all hot and bothered about. Well here is my personal (grossly simplified) take on it. This whole problem is all about secure connections to ‘so-called’ secure servers via a security protocol known as OpenSSL. So, firstly you should be aware that it is the server that may be running OpenSSL, not your desktop. There is nothing to ‘patch’ on the... Read more...
Where did that virus come from?
In the last few years we must have been asked by many dozens of clients to clean up large numbers of computers with some form of unwanted software on them – call it a virus, a worm, a trojan horse, rootkits, adware, malware, spyware, whatever – I’m just going to call it all ‘unwanted software’. Mostly this can be cleared up with careful use of the right tools and a tried and tested methodology which we’ve built up over a considerable time. But when it comes to handing back a freshly cleaned computer we are frequently asked the one question... Read more...