I was speaking with our friend David Perry at Trend Micro about the insecurity of social networking services and what steps users could take to strengthen their security online. In the course of our conversation, we came up with a list of simple steps you could take to better protect yourselves. Be careful about whom you

As I write this, Twitter, the popular social networking site is experiencing a distributed denial of service attack. I do not know where the attacks are originating from, or the reason, but it occurs to me there may be hell to pay. So what motives? Perhaps the bad guys are upset that Twitter has recently

How secure is your Social Security Number? If your answer is "Very: I only ever give it to organizations who are entitled to know it", that may not be as safe as it sounds. Of course, there are a couple of fairly generic issues: some legitimate, convenient organizations may ask for it who are, nevertheless,

I just read a startling news story about how someone didn’t understand what NOT to post on Facebook. The article titled “British spy chief’s cover blown on Facebook” tells how the wife of Sir John Sawers put up way too much information on Facebook. You can read the story at http://tech.yahoo.com/news/nm/20090706/tc_nm/us_britain_mi6 You don’t have to

The news broke a short time ago that pop star Michael Jackson died of a heart attack. It is all too predictable that the bad guys will use this news event to spam out fake videos or links to alleged pictures in order to trick users into installing their malicious software. If you receive an

It’s often claimed that men think about sex very seven seconds. Sorry, where was I? Oh yes… I’m not sure where that pseudo-statistic comes from: apparently not from the Kinsey report as is often claimed, and a more recent poll, while reflecting perhaps more liberated views about sexuality than could be admitted to in the

The City of Bozeman, Montana effectively joined the ranks of phishers when they asked job candidates for their usernames and passwords for social networking sites that the applicant belongs to. In a report at , after considerable outcry the city rescinded its mindless policy. To begin with, the city was asking applicants to breach their

Just a few short days ago I read the announcement that Microsoft announced a new relationship with the social networking services Twitter and Facebook. The relationship was created to enable users of Xbox Live to access their profiles and post photos to their Facebook accounts and allow Twitter users to post and read messages –

An IT/business magazine called Information Age, apparently aimed at executives with interest and responsibilities in IT, hit my letterbox this morning. That’s an actual magazine with real paper pages: remember those? Seeing as it’s Saturday, I took it back to bed with me to look through while I had the first coffee of the day, and