How Your Web Browsing Habits Impact Your Computer’s Security
No matter if you’re a home user, running a small business, or adminning for a 10,000-head corporation, web browsing will be the weak spot in your computer system’s defense. Because the number one path of infection for malware continues to be the web browser. These tips will [...]
An Introduction to Network Monitoring
There’s a difference between an intrusion detection system monitor and a network monitor. While an intrusion detection system is responsible for protecting the system from outside threats, a network monitor just watches for internal failure conditions, such as overloaded servers, crashed servers, faulty network connections, and other problems.
In a typical use [...]
Concepts of Network Security
The first thing to understand about network security is that it’s all about preventing unauthorized users from accessing a network. This is different from information security, which protects against things like automated malware such as viruses. The second thing to understand is that securing your network has to take into account that [...]
Security in technology platforms continues to be a matter of grave concern. The birth of new gadgets ensures that many devices, as they get adapted into society, will be just that many more gizmos to play with for purposes both good and bad. It’s partly instructive and partly amusing to take a look at how [...]
The smartphone set has so far been smugly confident that they’re staying ahead of malware. But desktop and laptop users know what’s coming: there is no such thing as a completely secure computing system, and smartphones are no exception. Already, a few smartphone viruses have been spotted in the wild; they use SMS and Bluetooth [...]
The word “hacker” is perhaps the most badly-abused term in history. From its origins in the MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) programming groups of the 1960s, where it originally meant “good programmer”, it has been seized by the media and turned into a word meaning “cybercriminal”.
Then the distinction had to be made between the first [...]
We all love gadgets, and we hope you love them to. But when we look at the news lately, perhaps we’re seeing that some people love them a little too well? Here’s a round-up of recent stories in the news from all over the world of crimes involving cell phones. Would you people out there [...]
You may treat the following as a law of computing: There is no such thing as a device which cannot be exploited. Nothing. If you networked a Beowulf cluster of pocket calculators, hooked together a Token ring of Speak-n-Spells, or chained a herd of remote-control cars together, somebody, somewhere, would find a security exploit for [...]
Once upon the 20th century, we had the phreakers. Phreakers were phone hackers; they’d use various equipment and techniques to rig the public phone system, getting free calls, snooping on private calls, even running their own private network, and generally abusing the telephone system for naughty stuff. Then along came the computer age proper, and [...]
Yipe! The panic is spreading all over the web, both within and without the land of Oz. This is happening because the Australian government is considering wide-scale Internet filtering, with no way to opt-out, for all web users. And it has nearly everyone concerned in an uproar. Just a few clips about what we’re talking [...]
