Robert Siciliano Security Analyst at Safr.me
In July, more than 15,000 security pros, hackers, hobbyists, and researchers met in Las Vegas for the Black Hat Conference 2017 at Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas. This was the 20th year that the security conference was held, and both black and white hat hackers joined together to discuss security. For two decades, Black Hat has gained a reputation for ...
29 July 2017 /security
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 c...
28 July 2017 /security
A well done New York Times article recently re-introduced this topic to the masses. Being “owned” isn’t new, but the term is not becoming part of popular culture. If you use the internet or are often on social media, odds are good that you have been OWNED. Whether you are called out for a misspelling on your latest Facebook post, or you were prove...
13 June 2017 /security
You have surely heard of Instagram, the photo sharing social network, but what about “Finstagram?” If you are like most parents, you have rules about the social media practices of your kids. However, once you learn about Finstagram, those might all go out the window. When you combine the words “fake” and “Instagram,” you get Finstagram. Essentiall...
27 April 2017 /security
This post isn’t exactly a “how to” but if your current employment isn’t bringing in the bacon, I’m sure your criminal mind can figure it out. In the biggest digital advertising fraud in the history of the U.S., it was recently found that a group of hackers is bringing in from $3 million to $5 million a day from media companies and brands. That’s s...
08 February 2017 /security
Fake news is a problem that is taking the internet by storm, and it ran rampant during the 2016 Presidential Election. In fact, many believe that fake news stories had a strong impact on the outcome of the election. In a survey following the election by the Pew Research Center, a whopping 64 percent of polled Americans said that fake news has give...
17 January 2017 /security
The October anniversary of the liability shift has passed, and anniversaries are an excellent time to look back on progress…this is no exception. The U.S. EMV migration plan was set four years ago as a way to fight card fraud and to protect both consumers and merchants. Back in the day, we had one choice when we wanted to purchase something, and t...
02 November 2016 /security
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 sto...
14 July 2016 /security
It’s all about code—the building blocks of the Internet. Software code is full of unintentional defects. Governments are paying heavy prices to skilled hackers who can unearth these vulnerabilities, says an article at nytimes.com. In fact, the FBI director, James B. Comey, recommended that the FBI pay hackers a whopping $1.3 million to figure out h...
12 July 2016 /security
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....
08 July 2016 /security
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