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May 11, 2016 by Vertical Axion
Earlier this year, Bangladesh Bank, one of the largest in the nation of Bangladesh, was successfully breached. The keen hackers made off with a staggering $80 million, when they used the bank’s system to hack into the SWIFT network, which is a cooperative system responsible for handling the vast majority of the world’s cross-border payments. […]
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May 10, 2016 by Vertical Axion
Does your company work with health information in any capacity? If it does, be advised, HIPAA violations are real, and can cost you and your business big money. The most recent company to find itself in the crosshairs of the Department of Health and Human Services is the Feinstein Institute, which is a non-profit biomedical […]
May 9, 2016 by Vertical Axion
On the heels of the FBI’s dustup with Apple Computer, the Judiciary committee of the U.S. House of Representatives has advanced a bill to the full chamber that would give cloud-stored data and emails more than 180 days old some much needed protection from law enforcement searches. The new bill would update a 30-year old […]
May 7, 2016 by Vertical Axion
Windows XP was, by any measure, the most successful and ubiquitous operating system of all time. To this day, now two years after Microsoft formally ended support for the platform, there are still tens of millions of computers running XP. Fully, this is approximately 10.9% of the PCs on the planet. That’s dangerous, and if […]
May 6, 2016 by Vertical Axion
Here’s the hard reality: Even if you devote sufficient resources to get the best security money can buy to protect your business from hackers, you might still be at risk. The reason? Well, in addition to the fact that there’s no such thing as security that a determined hacker can’t breach, there’s the simple fact […]
May 5, 2016 by Vertical Axion
Are you, or is someone you know a driver for Uber? Have you used the rideshare service to get from Point A to Point B? If the answer to either of these questions is yes, then odds are good that at least some of your information has been shared with a variety of government agencies. […]
May 4, 2016 by Vertical Axion
When you surf the web, do you use a VPN (Virtual Private Network)? More than half a billion of the web’s users do, which is about a quarter of the web’s population, so you may be one of them. If you’re not, you should consider it, because it makes your browsing experience safer and more […]
May 3, 2016 by Vertical Axion
Google takes security more seriously than most companies, and it’s no wonder, given that the company’s Android Operating System is currently in use by more than 1.4 billion users worldwide. The latest version of Android (version 6.0, dubbed Marshmallow) includes such things as support for fingerprint scanners, a built-in patch level checker, verified boot functionality, […]
April 30, 2016 by Vertical Axion
If you have a Windows-based PC (and you probably do), then you’ve almost certainly had the dubious honor of seeing the dreaded BSOD, or Blue Screen of Death. Unfortunately, since the first appearance of that screen, it has had a history of being less than helpful. Mostly, what you get is a long string of […]
April 29, 2016 by Vertical Axion
Remember the good old days, when all Adware did was make your web browsing experience inconvenient by bombarding you with annoying popups? Sadly, those days appear to be over. There’s a new generation of Adware that goes far, far beyond that. Recently, a particularly nasty variant called VLMiner was found. It’s clever, and is programmed […]
April 28, 2016 by Vertical Axion
So, it turns out that the “Badlock” Samba exploit wasn’t quite as bad as it was originally cracked up to be. If you haven’t heard of Badlock, you’re not alone. It made the rounds in Internet security circles, but wasn’t widely publicized because it is a fairly specific, narrow threat, unlike some of the other […]
April 27, 2016 by Vertical Axion
If your company has one or more of millions of PCs still running Windows XP, your options are collapsing around you rather quickly, making it more important than ever to finally get around to upgrading to a more current OS. Microsoft formally ended all support for XP last year, and now Google has decided to […]
April 26, 2016 by Vertical Axion
It’s been a busy week at Oracle. The company has recently released a massive flurry of patches that fix a staggering 136 security issues for a wide range of the products it sells. This release comes in tandem with the decision to switch from CVSS 2.0 to CVSS 3.0 (the Common Vulnerability Scoring System). The […]
April 25, 2016 by Vertical Axion
Last year, an IoT (Internet of Things) security firm called Bastille Networks uncovered an attack from an unexpected vector. Hackers can actually take control of your wireless mouse, which has no on-board security, and use the device to spoof keyboard inputs to the computer it is attached to. The hope was that by revealing details […]
April 23, 2016 by Vertical Axion
Are you still using single factor authentication in your business? If so, you are taking an unnecessary risk. If the only thing standing between the hacking community and your company’s data is a password, then no matter how robust those passwords might be, it’s just a matter of time before someone slips up, and your […]
April 22, 2016 by Vertical Axion
Toy manufacturing giant Mattel was recently the target of a whaling scam that could have been both highly embarrassing and extremely costly, if not for a single stroke of luck. If you’ve not heard the term, “whaling” is a subset of the phishing scams that hackers commonly run, with the key distinction being that whaling […]
April 21, 2016 by Vertical Axion
More problems for the Adobe Flash player, and a new type of hacking attack that security experts are referring to as “Typosquatting.” If you’ve not yet heard the term, you’re not alone, but you can bet that it will be making headlines in the months ahead. So far, this type of attack is limited to […]
April 20, 2016 by Vertical Axion
If you have Apple QuickTime installed on a Windows-based PC, you should uninstall it immediately. In a public statement issued on 4/14/2016, the US-CERT recommends the removal of QuickTime for Windows. Apple announced that they’re no longer supporting the product in any way, including issuing security updates. On the heels of this announcement, the Zero […]
April 19, 2016 by Vertical Axion
The statistics are both shocking and dismaying. Even in the face of innumerable high profile data breaches, people still aren’t serious about personal data security. In fact, a shocking 95% of people admit to sharing between one and six passwords with friends. Most of these seem innocuous. After all, it’s not too much of a […]
April 18, 2016 by Vertical Axion
“What’s old is new again.” The simple truth is that tastes and trends seem to repeat. We’ve seen it countless times in the world of fashion, and now, we’re seeing something similar in the hacking community. Over the past year or so, hackers around the world have come to rely increasingly on a type of […]
April 16, 2016 by Vertical Axion
The hacking community seems to have found another viable business model, this time, in the form of ransomware. Given the success that hackers have been finding with this type of attack lately, they’ve upped their game, and have begun to experiment with and vary their approach when getting ransomware onto target machines. Samsam, a variant […]
April 15, 2016 by Vertical Axion
If you use Google Chrome, you might have the “Better History” extension installed. If you do, and you’ve upgraded it recently, you’ve probably seen a large influx of advertising on your screen. Yes, you guessed it, hackers have found yet another avenue of attack, this time, co-opting browser extensions. In this particular case, the browser […]
April 14, 2016 by Vertical Axion
You’ve probably heard that last year, Trump Hotels were successfully breached, and an unknown number of customer credit cards compromised. In fact, what makes last year’s breach of Trump Hotels remarkable as compared to the breaches of a number of other hotel chains last year is the almost complete lack of information about the incident. […]
April 13, 2016 by Vertical Axion
Apple reports that it has fixed a security issue you may not have known existed. The problem occurred only with the iPhone 6 and 6s Plus devices, and was specific to images. Here’s how it worked, prior to the fix: Your phone, as you know, has a lock screen. Your phone also has Siri. Siri […]
