Opinion

Continuing from Consumer Electronics Show 2015 here in Las Vegas where we were covering this week the first impresisions of the show and also some lessons that this digital invasion is leaving us. Now, we will approach another interesting topic that involves privacy and new technology: drones.

Ever lost a kid somewhere? Not anymore if the gadget vendors have anything to say about it. Now you can digitally strap your kid to your tablet and keep track of them. Kids not running enough to stay trim? There’s an app for that that works the same way. Got high blood sugar? You can keep track of that too using the sensor-du-jour highlighted at CES 2015 in Las Vegas.

While phishing-related malware is still mostly Windows targeting, attacks that rely purely on social engineering and fake web sites might be delivered by any platform, including smartphones and tablets. The more cautious you are, the better informed you are, and the more you think before you click, the more chance you have of leaving phishing craft stranded.

Social networks are fun, but can also spread misinformation and worse. We discuss myths about your contract with Facebook, and whether British politicians are interested only in their own salaries.

The media have associated a number of destructive hoaxes with 4chan: people need some historical perspective on how the site actually works.

Your home may be your castle, but on social networks, your friends are your perimeter. Will they enclose and protect your personal data?

One of the support scam sites used to mislead victims may be down, but the scam definitely isn’t about to go away.

Every educational institution should be aware that cyber criminals make money by stealing personal information and selling it on the black market to other criminals who turn the data into cash through a range of fraudulent schemes. Here are ten security measures schools should take to defend against this type of data crime.

The US is still perceived as a hotspot for card fraud: what difference will the ongoing roll-out of Chip & Signature EMV make?

The top three teams from the fifth annual Mayors’ Cyber Cup will attend Cyber Boot Camp at the headquarters of ESET North America for five days of hands-on security training and lectures from IT experts, law enforcement, and career advisors.

Graduation is a great time to review your social media profile. Don’t let a wild and crazy social network presence undermine the promise of graduation, your chances for a scholarship, job, internship or other career choices.

Encryption is essential to cyber security today, with encryption of personally identifiable information (PII) being a top priority for organizations large and small, to protect customers and avoid fines and penalties after data breaches.

The never-ending Windows support scam often misrepresents obsolete MS-DOS utilities. But three simple rules will bypass most of that social engineering.

Microsoft announces a zero-day security flaw in many versions of Internet Explorer, the first to hit Windows users since XP support was terminated on April 8, potentially crippling IE on XP systems.

Can’t yet upgrade from XP? Recommendations are being made by Gartner and others for staying (relatively) safe.

This patch Tuesday, April 8, 2014, sees the last updates to be released to the public for Windows XP and Office 2003. After today, these programs have reached their End of Life (EOL) status, and will no longer be supported by Microsoft

Dynamic or on-access Mac testing of AV products is problematical with samples for which Apple has implemented signature detection.

As Mac malware increases in prevalence, testing security software that supplements OS X internal security gets more important and more difficult.

If someone rings you up to tell you that your bank card has been compromised, it may be because they want to get their own hands on it.

The city of Chicago recently announced a change to the curriculum for schools in their district that would introduce children as young as primary school to computer science concepts. It would also allow students to count computer science as a core subject that fulfills graduation requirements. What does this say about the current state of computer-related education?

(All four blog articles in this series, of which this article is the last, are available as a single paper here: The_Thoughtful_Phisher_Revisited.) From the sort of ‘visit this link and update or we’ll cancel your account’ message that we saw in the previous blog in this series (The Less Thoughtful Phisher), it’s a short step