The federal government took much needed action today against sleazy PC tech support scammers and fake AV peddlers. Actions include lawsuits, a judgment of $163 million, and freezing of multiple assets. PC tech support scammers will be familiar to regular readers of this blog because David Harley and others have charted the progress of this

If I sound confused it’s because I just saw my wife’s iPhone and iPad in a very strange place: a million line spreadsheet of iOS device data that includes the unique identifiers of her devices and the names she had given them, published by a group of hackers who call themselves AntiSec. This group claims

Now is the time to disable Java in your web browser, or even remove it from your system if that is practical. Why? The bad guys are hard at work trying to exploit a zero day vulnerability in the latest version of Java (version 1.7, Update 6.). This vulnerability is the subject of a US-CERT

A crime wave of malware that demands money from victims to avoid prosecution by the FBI has been alarming web surfers across America. Victims suddenly find their computer frozen, and an official-looking  page, like the one shown below, is displayed in their web browser. The FBI and the Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) have received

Sharing details of the hack that “wiped his life” has earned Mat Honan a place in the annals of information system security; the specific inter-dependence of flawed authentication systems that cost him so dearly–encompassing Apple, iCloud, Amazon.com, Gmail and more–would probably still exist if Mat had not gone public. Wired has the full story here

Changing the passwords on your online accounts might not sound like a fun weekend activity, but that’s what I did last weekend. Why? Because on Sunday I found out that one of my email addresses was in the list of Yahoo! logins whose passwords were exposed by sloppy handling of a credential file (an incident

Are you one of the 50 million users of Instagram, the photo-sharing service bought by Facebook in April for $1 billion? If so you need to look out for an Instagram update to fix a vulnerability that has just been published by Spanish security researcher Sebastián Guerrero. This vulnerability, which Guerrero has dubbed the "Friendship

Evidence that criminals are targeting the computer systems of small businesses continues to mount. The Wall Street Journal recently drew attention to the way cybercriminals are sniffing out vulnerable firms. The article highlighted the fact that about 72% of the 855 data breaches world-wide last year that were analyzed in Verizon's Data Breach Investigation Report

Just as I was putting the finishing touches on a blog post about the need to keep your data and devices safe on summer travels, I got an email from Apple letting me know that now was a great time to buy a Mac for college. I don't plan to go back to college at

Summer is here and for many families that means travels plans, but do your summer travel plans include taking care of your data and digital devices? Which digital devices do you plan to take on your trip and what sort of data do they contain? Perhaps more importantly: What kind of data can they access?