Entries by Robert Siciliano

Thinking About Building a Safe Room?

A safe room also known as a panic room is designed to keep bad out and extend your lifetime. Bad could be in the form of Mother Nature’s wrath, manmade disaster or a human predator. There are varying levels of options and financial investments based on what exactly you want to protect yourself from.  For…

Human Security Weaker Than IT Security

Information technologies have evolved to a level at which the developers, programmers, and security specialists all know what they’re doing, and are able to produce products and services that work and are reasonably secure. Of course, there’s always room for improvement. Despite the amount of criminal hacking that goes on, users who effectively implement the…

Phone Scammers Have No Shortage of Targets

Scammers call as a grandchild with a bad crackly phone connection in another country on vacation hoping the victim will believe they are their grandchild who needs to get bailed out of jail. Other scammers call informing the victim they won the sweepstakes or lottery and only need them to pay by credit card or…

Defense Begins in Petit Home Invasions

It’s as hard for me to write this as it is for you to read this. In one of the worst publically known home invasions of the 21st century one defendant has received the death penalty while the other is facing the same fate. Joshua Komisarjevsky, confessed to the attack on the home and family of Dr.…

Reinforcing Your Doors Security (Part 3 of 3)

Frightening Statistics: 1 of every 5 homes will experience a break-in or violent home invasion. 80% of break-ins occur forcibly through a locked door. A burglary occurs every 15 seconds in the United States. This is why installing multiple layers of protection including a home security alarm, door reinforcement and numerous other methods are fundamental to your homes…

Reinforcing Your Doors Security (Part 2 of 3)

In a recent post I discussed 5 different kinds of door reinforcement devices. In this post I’m going to review a door frame reinforcement device by Door Devil. I reached out to other manufacturers of door frame reinforcement and only Nick Fairless from Door Devil was kind enough to respond and send out a device…

Searching for Hotties Leads to Hacked PCs

Five or ten years ago, it was relatively easy for scammers to trick people into opening email attachments that would launch malicious programs on victims’ PCs. Nowadays, most email providers won’t permit .exe attachments, so viruses may be saved as compressed files, or hidden behind links that appear to lead to PDFs or word documents.…

Should You Store Passwords In The Cloud?

It seems that almost every site on the web requires a password. At least twice a week, I get an email from someone who wants me to join yet another network, which requires yet another username and password. You can cop out and use the same username and password combination, but that’s just asking for…

Bought a Car Recently? Watch Your Identity Information

Over the past 15 years, we have watched hackers’ evolution from “phreaking” phone systems, to hacking government agencies like NASA, and eventually creating viruses that take down networks. In the beginning, their primary motivations were fun, fame, and amusement. Over the past ten years, the game changed dramatically, from fun and fame to financial gain.…