News
Your receipt by e-mail. Is this OK?
I’ve noticed an upsurge in retailers asking me for my e-mail address, so they can send me a copy of my receipt. If that is all they are going to use it for, then that might be great because I will then have an electronic copy that I can keep and not have to worry…
Read MoreNew Privacy Policy 2017-08-01
We’ve updated the Privacy Policy on your website. We hope you enjoy it! ?
Read MoreData Breach Handling – 3 recent examples.
You might remember that last year, Yahoo! were shown to have suffered a data breach not once, but twice which led to the personal data associated with ~1.5 billion accounts being stolen by evil doers. This was a pretty massive story at the time and it was widely reported.
Read MorePhishing subject lines – Top 10.
What would you expect if you got an e-mail with the subject line of “Security Alert”? How about “Unusual sign-in activity”? You probably expect it to be an e-mail that is trying to raise your awareness about some potential security issue. I’m afraid it is likely not. These are just two examples from the Top…
Read MoreState agency wants to track tourists.
A story was published in the Irish Times yesterday about a long running debate between the Central Statistics Office (CSO) of Ireland (the state agency for government statistics) and the Data Protection Commissioner (the state agency for the protection of personal data) in regards to a request that the CSO had submitted to get Irish…
Read MoreCommunication is vital after a disaster.
Maersk Line were one of the biggest victims of the Petya/NotPetya Ransomware worm that struck on 27th June 2017. Here are some details, in case you missed it. Two weeks later, they are still not back to full operational capacity, but they are doing something really well. The are using the critical competence of communication…
Read MoreThe latest Ransomware outbreak – Petya
So here we go again with another outbreak of Ransomware, based on the National Security Agency (NSA) hacking tools that were leaked by a hacking group. Some experts are calling this one Petya, as it seems very similar to the Petya Ransomware strain that has been around for over a year.
Read MorePermission to spy on you?
Most people have smart phones these days and of course smart phones really come into their own through the use of Apps. There seems to be an app for every conceivable thing and lots of them are free. The phone makers make a good effort to protect us from bad apps by making sure that…
Read MorePhone scams – some current examples
In the last few days, I’ve received a couple of attempted phone scams. The first was a new one on me, but the second was an old favourite.
Read MoreHow a typo can cause you problems.
Nobody is perfect and we all make mistakes. One of the most common mistakes, in particular with mobile phones and their small keyboards, is the simple typo. Did you know that the evil doers have got sneaky ways that they try to capitalise on your fumbling fingers? It’s a technique called “Typosquatting“.
Read MoreFireball – 1,000 times bigger than Wannacry.
Have you seen the news reports and headlines about Fireball? No? That’s odd. 250 million PCs are infested with it. That’s a thousand times more machines around the world than WannaCry (you do remember WannaCry don’t you, or was it sooo two weeks ago ?). So you would think the news organisations would be all…
Read MoreSick subtitles can infect your media player
Do you use a media player like VLC, Kodi, Popcorn Time or Strem.io? Perhaps you are using one of those “dodgy” Android boxes? If so you will want to update them to their latest version ASAP because it is possible that they might pick up subtitles that can compromise the machine that you are playing…
Read MoreWe’ve launched our new GDPR section.
With one year remaining before the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) comes into force, we’ve published a new section on our website to start providing our visitors with some practical information and advice on how they can prepare their businesses for the GDPR. Our first section is live, dealing with individual’s rights under the…
Read MoreWannaCry no more. At least for now.
I’m just going to have a short article this week, just to close off the WannaCry story and counter any of the misinformation that was spread by some supposed “experts”. WannaCry is still circulating and affecting machines, but thanks to the kill switch discovered by @MalwareTechBlog, it is more or less neutralised now. Those machines still…
Read MoreDo you WannaCry? I didn’t think so.
I delayed this week’s blog, just to let some of the dust settle on the whole WannaCry (also known as WCry or WannaCrypt) furore and see if we can learn anything from it that will help protect my readers going forward. I’ll start with some easy background on Ransomware and them explain what was special…
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