People have always paid attention to your status. Now they do it on social media. Status is your “standing” in society. It could mean whether you are married, employed, rich, poor, saving the world, up to no good, home or not. Status in terms of home security begins with your whereabouts. By now we should…
If you have children you know what worry is. If you have a daughter you worry times ten. I have 2 daughters and I worry times 10,000. Worrying is unproductive however, but taking action can and putting your worry to work can create positive results. In a small Massachusetts town a recently graduated and talented…
Protect your information by creating a secure password that makes sense to you, but not to others. Most people don’t realize there are a number of common techniques used to crack passwords and plenty more ways we make our accounts vulnerable due to simple and widely used passwords. How to get hacked Dictionary attacks: Avoid…
I finally got one of those “I’m stuck in London” emails. My friend Kate’s Gmail account was hacked, and everyone on her contact list received an email from a hacker posing as Kate: “Hi, Apologies, but I made a quick trip, to London,United Kingdom and got mugged, my bag, stolen from me with my passport…
Once criminal hackers get a person’s username and email address, they can begin to launch a targeted spear phish scam. Scammers copy the design of each breached entities outgoing email campaign and blast the breached list with “account update” or other ruses. Gaming site Sega Pass was hacked. On the Sega Pass website it states,…
Today, there are over 2.2 million ATMs worldwide, and by 2015 there will be around 3 million. ATM skimming accounts for as much as 30% of all data theft. That’s about $350,000 in fraud every day in the United States alone, or more than a billion dollars a year. The ATM Industry Association is now…
Of all the things God would tell you to do, would it be break into someone’s house? Probably not. He might tell you to go invest in a home security system to prevent a home invasion but otherwise….no, I don’t think so. Gawker reports “The Connecticut native was arrested for breaking into a stranger’s home,…
B.J. Ostergren is a proud Virginian. She’s known as “The Virginia Watchdog,” but I like to call her “The Pit Bull of Personal Privacy.” She is relentless in her efforts to protect citizens’ privacy, and her primary concern is the posting of personal information online. To make this point, she finds politicians’ personal information, usually…
Years ago my childhood hero was this Chicago cop named JJ Bittenbinder. He would say “If all else fails, let them kiss you, then bite down on their lips until your teeth meet.” The Boston Globe reports a woman was attacked in an alley and her attacker lost a big chunk of his tongue. The…
According to a recent report from Verizon, data breaches are on the rise. There were 760 data breaches recorded in 2010, compared to 140 breaches in 2009. However, there were approximately four million records stolen in 2010, as opposed to 144 million stolen in 2009. This means there were fewer large-scale data breaches compromised of…
