Archive : General Tips

The software, music, movies piracy is a reality of our days, we like it or not. Although it’s illegal, some argue the use of pirated software(warez) mentioning the high cost of it, the lack of money or simply is using it because “it is there”, on some warez forums or blogs, without thinking too much at legal issues. This article has not as topic this debate if the warez use is justified or not, it’s everyone’s responsibility how they answer to this question and what [...]

I have received an email about an infographic related to online privacy threats and released by frugaldad.com, it shares in an easy to understand way the best tips for keeping users safe online. The graphic says it all, no more need of comments.     Source: frugaldad.com

This infographic in the source link provides clues to why Facebook is such a prime target. Source It all has to do with numbers; who has the most to have malware target. Why turn to a small community when you have millions of folk to target for the same effort. Microsoft battled all comers during the days of DOS to become the over-all winner. The results of that winning the battle of the Operating Systems has resulted in what is called the computer monoculture. According to Wikipedia, during [...]

Freedom to install free software When done correctly, “Secure Boot” is designed to protect against malware by preventing computers from loading unauthorized binary programs when booting. In practice, this means that computers implementing it won’t boot unauthorized operating systems — including initially authorized systems that have been modified without being re-approved. Source The above is a place trying to get signatures for a petition not to have it mandatory to install [...]

In today’s world it is common for the hacker to find flaws that can be exploited in software allowing access where there should be none. Those being found for the first time and not already known are rare but are called zero day because there is no defense against it until it is understood how it is done and therefor how to block that method. Those that hack for bad (known as black hat), when getting a hold of such knowledge as unknown methods to access computers by weakness in code, will often [...]

I have no answers for the question, just examples and other questions. If you’ve been living under a rock the last year, malware writers have been finding holes to use digital certificates to slip in to computers. What are digital certificates? From Webopedia: An attachment to an electronic message used for security purposes. The most common use of a digital certificate is to verify that a user sending a message is who he or she claims to be, and to provide the receiver with the means to encode [...]

Let’s take a look at the next scenario: in a morning when you check your emails, you find one with the subject “Top Ten jokes about wives” or … “Eva Mendes naked in the pool” but the sender is unknown to you. The email has a PDF file as attachment or maybe contains a link, what are you gonna do? Perhaps you think: if the attachment is not an executable then it can not be a virus and it’s safe to open it or if it’s about a website, it’s safe to [...]