In recent years, an increasing number of companies have migrated to the Cloud for cost-saving reasons, but today, we got a painful reminder of the limitations and risks associated with doing that. Amazon’s cloud-based service, AWS, suffered an outage that is impacting a number of people who rely on the service, including, but not limited to: • Trello • Quora • IFTTT • Wix • Alexa •...
Over the weekend, a hacker who goes by the name Stackoverflowin performed a public service. Of course, in the process of doing so, he terrified and confused a lot of people. Having researched a printer vulnerability, he wanted to help get the word out and have a little fun at the same time. So, he wrote a script that sent commands to...
JavaScript is hands down the tool of choice of hackers who are interested in inserting malicious code onto a user’s device. Most commonly, scripts are embedded in compressed (zipped) files, and when unpacked, install on the user’s machine without him or her even being aware of what’s going on. The problem has reached such epic proportions that Google has recently made...
Improving technology and a social media habit are converging in an unfortunate way that is opening the door for a new kind of hacking. Now, not even your selfies are safe. Here’s what’s happening: Thanks to radical improvements in the quality of digital cameras in recent years, it’s possible to take crisper, clearer digital photos than ever before. This, combined with...
File this one away under “it should go without saying, but…” One of the most amazing and disheartening aspects of internet use is that after all this time, a shocking number of people are still getting taken in by the lure of installing a “crack” for popular software. It should go without saying that installing a cracked version of any software carries...
Hardly a week goes by that a new exploit or attack vector doesn’t come to light that your IT staff has to try to defend against. The most recent threat comes from a vulnerability in the PHP Mailer Library, which is code used by most of the websites in existence today to help manage the sending of emails. If you have a...
If you use Netgear routers in your home or office network, you should be aware of the latest security threat. The company has confirmed that three lines of its routers may have these issues: • R6400 • R7000 • R8000 series At this time, it has not been confirmed if or whether the R7000P, R7500, R7800, R8500 or R9000 models are also vulnerable. The...
Yet more critical security flaws have been found in Adobe’s poor, beleaguered Flash Player. The company continues to fight gamely to keep pace, patching issues as quickly as they are found, but there doesn’t appear to be any end in sight. The most recent bug, tracked as CVE-2016-7890, would have allowed hackers to take control of both a smartphone’s microphone and...
Microsoft made a mistake, and it could complicate your life. If you’ve got your computer set up to receive automatic updates, you may have suddenly found yourself unable to connect to the internet after the December 9th update, labeled “KB3201845.” That’s because changes in the code made it impossible for the OS to accept an IP address assignment. The issue was caught right...
Cybercrime is growing up. Increasingly, on the Dark Web, customers can find a wide variety of hacking activities offered as a “service.” There is everything from DDOS attacks launched by massive ‘botnets to carefully orchestrated phishing campaigns to ransomware attacks. If you’ve got the cash, the hackers have the services. They’re also getting increasingly savvy in terms of communicating with each other,...
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