I attended the Matrix Group Security and Compliance Committee meeting this month and I asked them what we’re doing this month to make our clients and Matrix Group more secure. We talked about a lot of things, including new protocols, ongoing reviews, and our yearly security assessment. One thing kept coming: our clients need to […]
A couple of weeks ago, we had a security alert at the office. A client had called to say that a member reported a breach of the association’s website. Employees at a member company had each received an email with an attachment containing their username and password. A quick check showed that the information in […]
I’ve blogged in the past about password managers and why I think everyone needs one. Yes, everyone. Even your children. Not convinced? I asked my 8 year old about his various online accounts. Turns out he’s got about a dozen accounts already, between Spanish, Math, school blog, Minecraft, Fornite, etc. How does he remember them? […]
A couple of weeks ago, there was a lot of news about a massive brute force attack against WordPress sites to install Minero Miner, Minero is a javascript Crypto miner. The attack used information from the site, like the domain name, common logins and common passwords, to try and gain access to the site. Let […]
I just came back from the annual convention of the Sheet Metal and Air Conditioning Contractors’ National Association (SMACNA) in beautiful Colorado Springs, Colorado. SMACNA asked me to talk about digital threats to businesses. A big threat is clearly the potential for a company’s website to be hacked. Even if a website doesn’t contain any […]
A couple of weeks ago, a client called in a panic to ask if their website had been hacked. Here’s the scenario: one of the administrative assistants had received an email from a senior VP, asking for a copy of their membership database. The email looked legit so she exported a member list and emailed […]
Last week, we contacted a client to coordinate a site server upgrade, which required a DNS change. The response we got was a little alarming. The client’s IT Director had left and nobody knew where the password to their DNS registry was kept. Ouch. I had lunch with a friend who said he keeps passwords […]
A couple of weeks ago, the daily deal website LivingSocial reported a cyberattack that breached the accounts of some 50 million subscribers. The information breached included names, email addresses, date of birth, and encrypted passwords. Ugh. These system breaches are so common these days that we change passwords, shrug and move on. And yet most […]
I got a new iPhone last year and configured it to upload photos to Facebook. Imagine my surprise when photos of me and my kids ended up public on Facebook, even though I have my settings set to all photos as viewable by Friends Only by default. So I dutifully reviewed all of my Facebook […]
A couple of months ago, a NASA laptop containing personal information about employees was stolen. Apparently, this is not a rare occurrence. If you google for “stolen laptop containing personal information,” you get thousands of hits. Ugh. I used to lose sleep at night because so many of my staff use laptops as their primary […]