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Hey YOU, SMB, yeah I’m talking to you. There are a number of things that you can do to not only protect your personal information, but also the information you have in your business:

1. Hire a professional – It is entirely possible the small business was hacked because they did not employ technicians to prevent it in the first place. Therefore 3rd parties that specialize is security and breach mitigation should be contacted immediately. These IT security professionals specialize in containment. Thei

You have likely heard of the dangers of using unsecure public Wi-Fi, so you know that hackers are out there snooping. It is pretty easy to hack into a laptop or mobile device that is on a public Wi-Fi connection with no protection. Hackers can read your emails, steal passwords, and even hijack your website log ins.

Let’s imagine that you are in a local coffee shop with your laptop. All someone has to do is download a wireless network analyzer, which usually has a free trial, and with the right ha

Hackers are making a lot of money thanks to phishing attacks these days, and now they are also focusing on gift card scams. One of the most notorious scam groups, Scarlet Widow, which is out of Nigeria, has been boosting its efforts to scam people with gift cards since 2015. This group generally focuses on people in the UK and US and also is known for tax scams, romance scams, and rental cons.

Are you at risk of getting scammed by Scarlet Widow? The group generally focuses on medium to large US b

Riviera Beach, a city in Florida, has agreed to pay a $600,000 ransom to hackers who attacked its network.

This week, the City Council voted to pay the demands after coming up with no other option to meet the demands of the hackers. It seems that the hackers got access to the system when a staff member clicked on a link in an email, which uploaded malware to the network. The malware disabled the city’s email system, direct deposit payroll system and 911 dispatch system.

According to Rose Anne Brow

Do you ever use the same password over and over again for different accounts? If so, you are not alone. However, this is quite dangerous. It’s best to use a different, unique password for each account, and to make it easier, you should use a password manager.

According to surveys, people understand that they should use unique passwords, and more than half of people get stressed out due to passwords. Furthermore, about 2/3rds of people said that they had forgotten a password or that a password iss

Certified ethical hacker training is commonly denoted as the course that teaches you to break through your own or your company’s computer/s in a legitimate and official manner to find out the existent vulnerabilities and to assess the safety bearing of the target system. Certified ethical hackers use the same tools and knowledge that malicious attackers exploit and execute the indicated defensive, counteractive and protective actions to protect the system from any breach in future.

The ethical ha

As you might know, at the end of July, all types of hackers came to Las Vegas to attend Blackhat 2017. During the conference, some pretty scary hacks were exposed, and we can all take this as a lesson on what we are up against in this technology-heavy world. Here are some of the scariest hacks we learned about during Blackhat 2017:

Carwash Hijacking

Nothing is safe from technology, and these days, carwashes are an unexpected target for hackers. It is perfectly possible that a car wash could be hac

The term, or in this case the word “blackhat” in tech generally refers to a criminal hacker. The opposite of black is white and a “whitehat” is a security professional. These terms originate from the “spaghetti western” movies when the bad guy cowboy wore a black hat and the law wore white hats. Fun huh?! Blackhat is also the name of the largest conference on the planet for information security. The conference itself is 20 years old and as Alex Stamos who is the CSO for Facebook and also Blackha

If you are like most of us, you probably have a password, antivirus program, and a firewall for your home computer to protect it from hackers. Are you doing the same thing for your phone?

From 2015 to 2016 malware infections on smartphones swelled by 96%, and about 71% of the smartphones out there do not have any software at all to protect them. What does that mean for you? It means the odds are against you when it comes to getting your phone hacked. Luckily, there are some things you can do to p

You might think it’s crazy to actually hire a hacker, but if you don’t have an ethical hacker on your security team, you could be playing a dangerous game.

Ethical hackers are called “white hat hackers” and are legal hackers, that help businesses find security problems in their networks. Developer and security teams, who build out codes, should have a white hat hacker on their side. This way, they will know from the start if the code is vulnerable. This is also known as “application security”.

How

For more than four years, malware has been posing as legitimate software and infecting industrial equipment across the globe.

The malware, which looks just like the Siemens control gear software, has affected at least seven plants in the US. According to security experts, the malware was specifically designed to attack this industrial equipment, but what it does is not totally known. It is only described as a type of “crimeware.”

The malware was first hinted at in 2013, but at that time, it was no

A new study was just released by the National Association for Information Destruction. What did it find? Astonishingly, about 40% of all digital devices that are found on the second-hand market had personal information left on them. These include tablets, mobile phones, and hard drives.

The market for second hand items is large, and it’s a good way to find a decent mobile device or computer for a good price. However, many times, people don’t take the time to make sure all their personal informati

In June, 2015, it was revealed by an anonymous source that the Office of Personnel Management was hacked. This office, which administers civil service, is believed to have been the target of the Chinese government. This is one of the largest hacks in history involving a federal organization.

Slowly, the motivation behind the hacking is being understood. At first, it seemed obvious, the stolen data being personally identifiable information, which is what was taken can be used for new account fraud

Let’s cut to the chase:

• Regularly back up the phone’s data! If this is done every day, you won’t have to worry much about losing important information if something happens to the phone—such as a ransomware attack.
• Keep the phone’s software and applications updated.
• Delete apps you no longer use, as these can reveal your GPS coordinates and garner data about you.
• Never post about your vacation while you’re on vacation.

But there’s more:

• Employ the device’s password-protect function (which may even be a

Hackers bank heavily on tricking people into doing things that they shouldn’t: social engineering. A favorite social engineering ploy is the phishing e-mail.

How a hacker circumvents two-factor authentication:

• First collects enough information on the victim to pull off the scam, such as obtaining information from their LinkedIn profile.
• Or sends a preliminary phishing e-mail tricking the recipient into revealing login credentials for an account, such as a bank account.
• The next phase is to send out

An impostor posed as Lorrie Cranor at a mobile phone store (in Ohio, nowhere near Cranor’s home) and obtained her number. She is the Federal Trade Commission’s chief technologist. Her impostor’s con netted two new iPhones (the priciest models—and the charges went to Cranor) with her number.

In a blog post, Cranor writes: “My phones immediately stopped receiving calls.” She was stiffed with “a large bill and the anxiety and fear of financial injury.”

Cranor was a victim of identity theft. She conta

Get an account with TeamViewer, and you will have a software package that enables remote control, online meetings, desktop sharing and other functions between computers.

But recently, customers of TeamViewer have reported remote takedowns of their computers that resulted in different forms of monetary theft, such as bank accounts being cleaned out.

The cyber thieves controlled the victims’ computers via their TeamViewer accounts. Customers would witness their mouse arrow suddenly moving beyond the

Hackers can take over someone’s life in a matter of hours. Just ask Patsy Walsh.

Though she is not a tech savvy person, the grandmother of six did have a Facebook account, and that was all the hackers needed to take over her life. By using methods such as click baiting, the act of convincing someone to click on a fake link, and then gathering information, the hackers were able to use this info to get into other accounts, and eventually hacked things such as her power of attorney form, Social Secu

If your car is in any way connected to the Internet, it can get hacked into. You know it’s only a matter of time before hackers begin infiltrating motor vehicles in droves, being that vehicles are plagued with hundreds to thousands of security vulnerabilities.

This hack is more serious than you think. Drivers and passengers should be aware that “flawed” and compromised vehicles can suddenly be overtaken remotely, forced into shutting down the engine in the middle of a highway or drive the car int

“Anonymous” is an activist hacking group that has recently boasted that it will engage in 30 days of cyber assaults against “all central banks,” reports an article on cnbc.com.

And their bite is as big as their bark, as this announcement came soon after several major banks around the world were struck—and Anonymous proudly claimed credit. The banks that were apparently breached by Anonymous include:

• Bangladesh Central Bank
• National Bank of Greece
• Qatar National Bank

Anonymous put up their plans on a