PCI What? Ex-Home Depot Staff Told Friends To Use Cash Not Cards
The story behind the Home Depot breach continues to unravel bit by bit and as the pieces of the jigsaw start to fit together, the resulting picture doesn’t look pretty. Not one bit. According to an article in the New York Times, the situation appears to have been little more than shambolic in my opinion, […]
Android Set To Feature Out-Of-The-Box Encryption
All the tech news and commentary seems to be centred around Apple right now (or nVidia if you are a gamer), whilst the big security story is Home Depot, so you may have missed Google’s announcement that the new iteration of its popular Android operating system will have an interesting new feature: default encryption. KitKat’s […]
Digital Piracy Can Kindle Grief Of Amazonian Proportion
Love it or hate it, digital content is here to stay. Be it games distributed via Steam, underpriced apps from the App Store, or books from Amazon, all your digital entertainment and business needs can seemingly be provided for by the virtual world. But that can cause problems. Take apps for example – acquiring them […]
Server Anomaly Detected Captain Freenode, Set Passwords To Change
Email – malware attachments and phishing scams, but maybe not dead just yet. Facebook – privacy, what is privacy? WhatsApp – location, location. Snapchat – nothing is ever truly gone forever. There are many different ways of communicating these days (anyone remember the good ol’ times when you had to use a pen and paper and […]
Facebook's Exploding Posts: Mission Impossible vs. Robin Of Sherwood
This Facebook post will self-destruct in 5 seconds. Well, ok, maybe not 5 seconds. But your latest Facebook post could soon be gone in a timescale chosen by you (well, ok, anywhere between 1 hour and a week). A small number of users spotted the new feature in a Facebook iOS app earlier this week […]
Microsoft Sings We're Not Gonna Take It, Invites Contempt
“See you in court!” Aaargggh, no thanks, that sounds like a mighty stressful and bank balance-busting exercise in futility to me. But then again, I’m not Microsoft so perhaps I’ve got good reason to not want to end up in front of a judge. Not that I’ve done anything wrong of course. Honest. Just ask […]
Passwords: Microsoft Likes Them Easy, Google Prefers Them Pronounceable
Back in July Microsoft researchers suggested that simple passwords may be suitable for the majority of user accounts, based around their studies which showed the majority of users still preferred to recycle the same ridiculously simple login credentials everywhere they go on the web. And that’s despite the fact that password managers, which can be […]
Barclays: You're So Vein You Probably Think This Authentication Is About You
Back in May I asked elsewhere whether your veins could provide an alternative means of verifying your identity at the cash point. I concluded that, on the whole, the idea was sound though not entirely infallible. Sure, the risk of having your fingers cut off by a cash thief were slim (assuming the thief realised […]
Hanging Out With Tom Raftery on Technology For Good
Last week I was delighted to take part in the Technology for Good podcast. Tom Raftery kindly invited me onto the show. The show focuses on the latest technology news with a view to seeing how it can be used for the greater good. It was a fun podcast and typical of two Irish men […]
It Professionals: Phishing Attacks Against Organisations Are Rife
A new survey sponsored by HP has revealed that 69% of IT professionals are seeing phishing attacks within their organisation at least once a week. It also discovered that seven out of every ten attacks originating within the network came from a malware-infected machine, suggesting that a layered approach to security was still relevant, in […]