Reading Time: 2 minutes In recent years, a combination of Onion routing and the Tor network have allowed users stay hidden with great internet privacy. This is appealing to many people concerned about increasing widespread and sophisticated internet surveillance. Unfortunately, it also provides an environment for hackers and internet fraudsters to flourish. Such locations are sometimes referred to as…

Reading Time: 3 minutes Code signing certificates from a trusted certificate provider allow developers to digitally sign their software so that customers know the code has not been altered or hacked when they download it. When customers buy software in a store, the source of that software is obvious. Customers can tell who published the software, and they can…

Reading Time: 2 minutes Hardly a day goes by where we don’t learn about a new exploit to a major system that hackers use to wreak havoc on web users. The time has come to think about a new approach to browsing, one where you are protected by a sandbox. A study carried out by AV-TEST over a period…

Reading Time: 3 minutes Opinions on Bitcoin, the electronic payment method vary widely. To some, it represents no less than the dawning of a new age of individual empowerment and the beginning of the end of the nation state as we know it. Others dismiss it as a fad that rivals the famed medieval tulip craze, the very definition…

Reading Time: 2 minutes Increasingly hackers are adopting the highly targeted approach of cyber attackes, known as Advanced Persistent Threats (APT).  The attacks are growing in their number, sophistication and diversity of target. A 2013 Verizon report on data breaches makes clear that we all need to be on guard for so called “Advanced Persistent Threats” (APTs).

Reading Time: 2 minutes How important is your email communication? Would it be a problem if someone intercepted it? What if someone modified it before reaching the recipient or simply sent email impersonating as yours? Many people are discovering the hard way that unsecure email can be a very real problem. Much of the focus in internet security has…

Reading Time: 3 minutes A botnet, a network of unwillingly controlled computers, is sometimes called a Zombie network. That’s because, like “real zombies” the computer owners aren’t aware of what has happened to them. In the case of the Kelihos botnet, a better term might be a Vampire network. The network has been “killed” several times, but always manages to…

Reading Time: 2 minutes It’s often said “What’s old is new again”. The well-known ZeuS banking trojan is back again, but this time it is being spread as a 64 bit version. In fact, the 64bit version was embedded in the old 32bit version. If the Trojan senses that the target browsers 64bit it will inject the appropriate version….

Reading Time: 2 minutes When we think of an “arms race” we usually think of advances in weaponry that cause death and destruction. It seems that there is a very different type of arms race underway that deals with bits and bytes instead of bombs and bullets. The security firm FireEye believes that an IE vulnerability has been recently…

Reading Time: 2 minutes Internet site security requires a layered approach, at least if you want to sleep well at night! No single layer provides 100% protection. Encryption ensures that no one can “listen in” on a conversation between a browser and a web server. However, hackers may be able to divert or send a user to a fraudulent…