Tag: internet
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A week of hacks
This week has been one massive hack; 1st LinkedIn, then eHarmony and now Last.fm. What is especially galling is that none of these companies salt their stored passwords – considering that unsalted password hashes are easily deciphered with the massive computing power available to anyone these days, this is a huge faux pas. “Salting stored…
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Moonlight kicked into touch
Wow, now this is a turn-around for the books – Microsoft bed-partner Miguel de Icaza saying that Moonlight development is being stopped specifically because a. Microsoft is concentrating on HTML5 and b. because Microsoft has imposed certain restrictions on Silverlight. Never thought I’d see the day … Hooray for the death of non-standard protocols and…
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Digital rights and your personal freedom
“We live in a democracy. Or so they told us.” If you take a look at democracies around the world today, you’ll find governments that behave in a completely undemocratic way. One just has to look at the lengths the US has gone to, in undermining the Bill of Rights in the pursuit of terrorism…
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Internet usage in 2011
Internet usage is breaking all sorts of records each and every year. The numbers are skyrocketing and to say they’re unbelievable is putting it mildly. Here is a snippet courtesy of pingdom: 107 trillion email sent 294 billion emails per day 1.88 billion internet users 89% of email is spam 262 billion spam emails per…
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It’s phishing and pharming XMas time again!
Scammers and authors of malicious software will take any opportunity to trick users into doing something they shouldn’t – holidays are a favourite time for the scammer. At Xmas, we all have that warm and fuzzy feeling. But so do the scammers and they prey on a softening of attitudes towards security at this time…
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Internet Explorer the safest browser – yeah right!
Microsoft has always bigged up their products using whatever mechanisms they can, including paid-for campaigns/ads and sometimes outright lying. The latest statement that IE is the most secure browser ( according to their yourbrowsermatters website ) fits into this latter category. One has to wonder how Microsoft comes about the scores provided on the site.…
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New security issue: typo-squatting
Malware, phishing, pharming, typo-squatting, etc. There’s a long list of security issues we have to deal with every day. Keeping track of these and responding correctly in each case is a veritable minefield. That’s after our newly updated anti-virus app has completely missed the threat. Typo-squatting is the well-known practice of serving up scams or…
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CA’s get hacked
Wow, it really has been a bad week for Certificate Authorities. First DigiNotar gets cracked by a seemingly insistent CA cracker called ComodoHacker; now GlobalSign has stopped processing certificate requests due to possible compromise by the same cracker. It all started in March this year with the Comodo CA breach. Next was StartCom the Israeli…
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CA’s get hacked off
Earlier this year, one of the biggest names in network-based security, RSA, was hacked. What made the situation a lot worse, was RSA’s hesitance to be forthcoming on the matter. And that unwillingness to disclose seems to be the trend these days. Get hacked. Don’t tell your clients … This lack of openness is becoming…
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Mobile Security in a nutshell
Mobile security has morphed in the last few years to become a major area of security concern. It’s no longer just laptops that provide on-the-go networked computing – smartphones, tablets, ultra-portables, e-readers and other networked devices now all vie for a space in your electronic arsenal, and they all come with their unique set of…
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Social media good and bad
Social media has played a huge part in the political and social world over the last year. Consider its links to uprisings in the Middle East and now riots in the UK. On the one hand we have idiots like Tottenham MP David Lammy calling for the suspension of RIM’s BBM service ( thanks David,…
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UK Violence
Any kind of violence is a sad thing to see. We’ve seen our own share here in the south of Africa however, things have been tailing off for a number of years now while people get on with the business of living. Yes we have our issues, but for the most part things just go…
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Email woes and etiquette
Based on issues that a client of mine has had in recent times with email, I decided to resurrect and rehash my XStore IT Bulletin no. 1 from July 2006. One of the biggest issues with email is the lack of understanding of how it works. In addition, the requirement to implement anti-spam solutions falls…
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New email service coming from XStore and SilcomIT
ISPs have recently been getting very strict in terms of email usage on their ADSL networks and have implemented quota management for outbound email when using their smtp relays. As a result, a client could: have email rejected once a certain threshold is reached ( eg. 30 emails per sender per hour ) be disconnected…
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Aussie web host/registrar hacked
Security and data integrity/safety are 2 of my pet loves; and pet hates when people don’t take notice of them. Notwithstanding the fact that you host your precious data with someone who you think is responsible, you need to take responsibility yourself. If something happens to your data and you’re left out in the cold,…
