A good friend of mine called me recently to ask what I knew about scams from online sales. He had placed an ad on CraigsList for something he was trying to sell and had asked for $150 for the item. He had received a call from a woman and she offered to send him a…
Last year, 2012, marks the first year in which the FTC received more than two million complaints overall, and 369,132, or 18 percent, were related to identity theft—an increase of 30% over 2011. Of those, more than 43 percent related to tax- or wage-related fraud. As the internet grows ever more pervasive and essential, we…
One fourth of all global information workers use their own devices at home and at work for work purposes. A recent survey report, commissioned by Unisys and conducted by Forrester Consulting, involved 2,600 IT workers and 590 business and their IT executives. CIO Insight points out that these are the “mobile elite,” a class of professionals who overwhelmingly…
Grey charge: When you buy something with your credit card and you get charged for something you didn’t want. Often a merchant will tack on additional products and services to a legitimate purchase you make, and you “sorta” know about the charge…but not really. For example, you might be in the process of purchasing something…
Wi-Fi was born to be convenient—but not secure. More than anything, though, it depends more on what kind of wireless we’re talking about. Public. Free, unsecured Wi-Fi is the least secure. Shared Wi-Fi in public, at home or in the office lacks encryption of the data packets streaming from the connected devices. In other words, your…
The holidays are over, the Consumer Electronics Show has passed, and now you have all these new shiny wireless gadgets you’re just itching to play with. Now, before you go and connect to the internet, please understand that it’s all fun and games until someone gets hacked. And many times, this means when you are…
Wireless connections can cost hundreds of dollars annually, so it makes fiscal sense that many people seek out free connections when they are out and about. But free doesn’t necessarily mean secure. By now you’ve heard all the warnings that publicly connected Wi-Fi, such as that found in coffee shops, airports and hotels, are vulnerable to sniffers. Sniffers read the…
A dinner, hosted by Yahoo’s CEO and another 11 CEOs and execs from Twitter, Google, Apple and more, recently took place in Silicon Valley. These major players, responsible for shaping our world of tech, simply sat down to break bread. You gotta wonder what the conversation was like. So this got me thinking: With whom would…
We’ve heard lots and lots about data breaches in the last decade. And with the term “cloud” becoming more prevalent (which, incidentally, just refers to a computer server connected to the internet), people are asking how secure their data is on the various websites they agree to host it. For example, online banking, online backup, social…
Whether you are on your home or office network or seeking out a free connection on public Wi-Fi, there are known risks that can be managed simply by using a free VPN. #1. Outdated operating system-critical security patches. When an operating system is released, it often is secure—or at least as it can be for the…
