The cyber criminals never stop, do they? From hacking to sextortion, it seems like everywhere you turn, some boogeyman is trying to disrupt our lives with a keyboard’s button and/or mouse’s click, or in this case, one swipe of the card.
The case I’m talking about is skimming. Skimming is a scam in which thieves can steal your information with one credit/debit card swipe using a device that can’t be read or detected. The devices these scam artists use today can easily fit in palm of a hand. They can even put in ATM’s and gas pumps. I saw footage this morning on ABC’s Good Morning America of a McDonald’s clerk using skimming to rip off a drive-thru customer. He ran a customer’s card twice: once through the fast food system and then through his own system. But thankfully, law enforcement is fighting back. In one case, a couple panicked because their rip-off device wasn’t in the gas pump. Yes, Instead, it was sting surveillance camera, and the couple were arrested. There has been thousands of arrest of these skimmers in recent years.
Yes, there are some things you can do. Check your debit/credit card statements and check them often. When in public, watch your clerk like a hawk! If the clerk is using two devices to process one payment, that should be a red flag. Plus, it never hurts to use good old fashioned cash. It was good enough for our ancestors. I’m not trying to scare anybody by reporting this. I just feel we have a responsibility to warn people when a dangerous trend is brought to my attention. It’s better to talk about it and never have it happened than ignore it and come home to an unpleasant surprise. So I want to hear your suggestions? What can we do to protest ourselves from skimming?
It’s probably the biggest hot-buttoned news story of 2014: the rise of terrorist group ISIS, or Islamic State. Hardly a day goes by when we don’t hear about an evil deed done by these extremist thugs. It seems that no one is immune, not even technology or social media.
On one of ISIS’s Twitter accounts, they’re calling for the assassinations of Twitter employees in the United States and Europe. Their tweets have called for sleeper cells and ‘lone wolves’ to kill employees and bring war to them. These same vile, vicious tweets told San Fransisco Twitter employees to watch their back. There is a suspect in question: Twitter account @Dawlamoon, an account operated to be loyal to ISIS, is at the center of this story. It isn’t confirmed if Dawlamoon is a true social media mouthpiece of ISIS, just one of their cheerleaders, or if it’s just blowing smoke to make headlines. But it is rumored, just that, rumored, to be an ISIS forum. But after the threatening Tweets were posted on back on Monday Sept 8th, the account was suspended. Lately, Twitter has been working around the clock to shut down all pro ISIS based accounts. Unfortunately, the terrorist organization is using techniques to counter such suspensions.
We’re living in a time that was unthinkable just 10 years ago. ISIS and other terrorist groups are using social media to push the propaganda offensive and the charm/charisma offensive to win people over to their twisted, sadistic cause. They even have You Tube videos of themselves giving ice cream to children. We in the technology community must do all we can to counter these lies before more people get duped. Twitter trying to suspend their accounts is a great start. Now I believe in free speech as much as anybody, but not when you’re threatening people’s lives. Let’s use our voices, vlogs, blogs, social media pages, smartphones, desktops, laptops and other devices to expose these thugs for who they really are. What else can we do to combat this threat?
Wow Russia, you’ve been in the news a lot lately. And I’m not talking about the Sochi Olympics. I’m talking about news events like conflict with Ukraine and the Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 crash. It’s no surprise they’re in the midst of a potential hacking story.
Gmail, one of the world’s most popular email services, has been severely hacked. Almost five million email usernames and passwords have found themselves in a Russian bitcoin forum.? Word got out about this when a suspicious link was posted to a website popular with hackers. The hacked accounts, which count up to 4.93 million, are in English, Russian and Spanish. Over half the tainted accounts can still easily be accessed. One thing Gmail? users can do is avoid any ‘security’ websites that claim to check and see if your username and passwords have been compromised. Cyber criminals love those sites and probably even created some of those sites. It’s been confirmed many of the hacked passwords weren’t even taken from Google. Before I throw Russia under the bus, we don’t know who is behind this hacking, though it’s coincidental the hack was first revealed on a Russian language forum.
They’re other things Gmail users can do. First and foremost, don’t panic. All you have to do is change your password and turn on two-factor authenticity. But I want to get back to where these hacks could come from. Do you understand why so many are suspicious that this originated from Russia or surrounding nations? There’s been a recent history of hackers from Eastern European nations causing a ruckus. Think about the social/political pushing and shoving between the US and Russia in the last couple of years. Is this just another criminal hack attack? Or does this have a deeper, more geopolitical meaning as things heat up internationally?
Maybe you’ve been vacationing in a very remote place over the weekend. If so, the technology and celebrity world came together under some of the worst possible circumstances.
Over the weekend, revealing pictures of A-List celebrities like movie star Jennifer Lawrence were released into the Internet by a computer hacker. It’s reported these celebrities’ iCloud accounts were hacked into and their intimate pictures are stolen. The iCloud is supposed to help Apple product users move data between their devices. Ms. Lawrence reported the cyber attack to authorities as soon as she got wind of it. Now the FBI is involved, only claiming they know about the incident and are seeking the hackers behind this incident.
We’re only within a week Apple’s big announcement. Now, that announcement could be in jeopardy. They may have to turn their excitement about a new iPhone or iWatch into cleaning up this iCloud hacking mess. Looks like Tim Cook and company are going to have to keep the champagne on ice a little while longer. And see what happens when you let a cloud keep floating without proper security protection? Jennifer Lawrence herself tweeted a complaint about it’s complications months before this happened. What lesson can Apple learn from this to keep not only celebrities, but the general public at large safe?
And don’t even get me started on the perverts…ahem…hackers who perpetrated this crime. And that’s exactly what this is, a crime. What these hackers are doing aren’t cool, sexy or revolutionary. It’s just plain wrong and sick. Some will say, “You shouldn’t be putting that online.” Let’s not blame the victims here. The hackers shouldn’t be violating people’s privacy. So if anyone whose reading this getting some sinister ideas, think twice. One guy who thought it was fun to hack people’s accounts and put their risque photos online is now serving ten years in prison. So what can we do to keep ourselves safe?
You heard it right ” Get a free year of LastPass Premium!”
If you are like me you have a ton of user names and passwords, on a lot of different sites. Using the same user name and password over and over is not only stupid, but it is dangerous and impossible. Every site has different naming rules for your passwords, must have 1 capital letter, needs a symbol, can’t have a symbol, needs a number and a capital letter, this list goes on for ages. Who can remember which variation of your user names and passwords that you used for 50 different web sites? LastPass can.
I was like most people, I knew my main password and the variations to an extent, and honestly relied on my browser to remember my password on a lot of things. But then disaster struck, I needed computer repair at my office in Boston. It was a bad hard drive and although data recovery was successful, my browser settings were reset and all my stored passwords were GONE.
I spoke to my boss about this and he immediately chimed in with “why aren’t you using LastPass?” To which I asked what it was, and he told me that LastPass stores all your passwords in 1 spot. All I would need to remember from now on was my LastPass password and I would never need to learn another password again. I was excited, but skeptical at the same time. What if someone hacked my LastPass account? Then they would have a smorgasbord of information from my student loans, to my credit cards even my bank account.
So I did my homework. ?LastPass has NEVER been hacked, NEVER. They are a security focused app, dedicated to securing passwords.?Furthermore, like any other service,?you should be using two-factor authentication with LastPass. If you do, someone with your master password still will not be able to access your account, even in the event of a breach. If you want to take it to the next level, you can?put together this awesome thumb drive-based system?and?enable these features?for extra two-factor security. LastPass is available for your desktop, and all smartphones and tablets! LastPass is also great for any types of businesses, like Law Firms or Dental Offices where you have a lot of different places you need to log in to.?
Where you treated at a hospital in the US, particularly a rural US hospital between April and June 2014? Watch your back, because hackers half way around the world know what ails you.
Community Health Systems had over 4.5 million patients’ hospital records hacked. This hacking has hit 29 states. Most of those compromised were in the rural areas in the American South and Midwest, though Pennsylvania was hit pretty hard. They claimed in a report to the US government the culprits were part of a hacking group from China, and it is an ‘Advanced Persistent Threat’. No motive is yet known. Here is where it gets interesting. A security company called Mandiant used a phrase ‘Advanced Persistent Threat’ to describe a Chinese Army unit hacking networks throughout the Western nations. Community Health Systems hired Mandiant to investigate this. As of this blog, it’s unclear Mandiant believes or not the Chinese Army had anything to do with this hacking. I just think it’s ironic how things come in circle like this.
As expected, China denies ever having a part in this. But this hacking dispute between China and the US has become disturbingly common in the past several years. One nation has accused the other of hacking something, whether it be military secrets or hospital records or bank codes. It sounds like this is pretty early in the investigation. It almost sounds like what Community Health Systems said vs. what Mandiant says vs. what the Chinese government says. But the Chinese Army isn’t the only suspect here. What if it’s some cyber crime rink in this country trying to get IDs to sale for $10 a pop? What if it’s a rival medical company whose behind this? What if it’s a disgruntle patient or former employee who was done wrong in some way and considers this revenge?
