This op-ed originally appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle on October 28, 2019. We occupy a richly-connected world. On the Internet, we collapse distance and shift time. But this Internet that delivers mail, connects us with friends, lets us work anywhere, and shop from the palm of the hand, is a mere 50 years old, slightly younger than Jennifer Anisto

Last week on Malwarebytes Labs, we celebrated the birth of the Internet 50 years ago, highlighted reports about the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) filing a case against stalkerware developer Retina-X, issued a PSI on disaster donation scams, looked at the top cybersecurity challenged SMBs face, and provided guidance to journalists on how they can defend t

A study conducted by the security firm Rapid7 revealed that millions of devices remain exposed to cyber attacks via  SMB, Telnet, RDP, and other types of improper configurations. Rapid7 published the second report National Exposure Index that provides Internet service providers (ISPs) worldwide information about the global exposure of devices. The researche

 The US Congress  decided to repeal an Internet privacy regulation passed under the Obama administration. For many, this is unsettling news. Trump has already initialed the controversial repeal, which allows Internet providers to store and sell users’ browsing histories. The previous regulation, however, required these companies to obtain permission fr

Every now and then the media comes up with a sensational story about the Deep Web. Often these tales are shocking and frightening – but are they true? What is the Dark Web and Deep Web? Before going further, we need to understand what the Deep Web actually is – fortunately the concept is much easier than you might think. Any web page that you can locate from

An Amazon AWS S3 outage is causing serious problems for a huge number of websites, applications, and Internet of Things devices. The Amazon S3 web-based storage service is experiencing serious widespread issues. Web services and mobile apps leveraging on Amazon S3 suffered a significant outage. According to the company, the Amazon S3 outage was caused by “hi

In the United States, there is a basic rule of thumb that at some point after a block of metal undergoes a certain amount of manufacturing, it becomes a rifle. When approximately 80 percent of the manufacturing is complete, the metal is not a weapon; at 81 percent, it is.A weapon is dangerous; it is often regulated, and more often than not, it has safety sta

‘Twas just the season when millions of unsuspecting consumers unwittingly courted disaster by gorging their digital appetites on gadgets, gizmos, and whiz bangs that delight kids of all ages with their digital magic.Which is the point of this nearly bah-humbug introduction. Because Arthur C. Clarke was right when he formulated his three laws, the best

Watch your favorite shows anywhere, and other useful VPN functions In simple terms, a VPN, or Virtual Private Network, is a connection between a group of discrete networks that exchanges encrypted data between your computer and a distant server. Sounds like boring technical jargon? Well, VPN’s can actually be used to perform some pretty neat tricks online t

One of the most common and most sensitive documents that companies handle on a daily basis is invoices. Issuing and receiving them is a fundamental activity for every business, however, people are not always aware of how important they are even after being paid or collected. Together or individually, they can expose critical information that can be very val

Well this is bad.Earlier in November, a report out of Germany claimed the popular Web of Trust (WoT) browser add-on was selling its users’ browser histories to third-parties without properly anonymizing the data, resulting in the personal identification of Web of Trust users. There was also some debate over whether the company behind WoT (WOT Services) p

The DDoS attacks that flooded Dyn last month and knocked some high-profile Web sites offline don’t mean businesses should abandon it or other DNS service providers, Gartner says.In fact, the best way to go is to make sure critical Web sites are backed by more than one DNS provider, says Gartner analyst Bob Gill.+More on Network World: Gartner Top 10 tech

Behavioral biometrics that uses machine learning is behind new features being added to IBM’s Trusteer Pinpoint Detect platform, which financial institutions use to head off crooks who may have stolen the username and password of legitimate account holders.The new feature looks for anomalies between legitimate users’ normal mouse gestures and those of the

An online hackers' forum has deleted a section that allegedly offered paid distributed denial-of-service attacks, following last Friday's massive internet disruption.HackForums.net will be shutting down the "Server Stress Testing" section, the site's admin Jesse "Omniscient" LaBrocca said in a Friday posting."I do need to make sure that we continue to ex

Last week’s massive distributed denial-of-service attack has prompted an urgent focus on the need for industry-led cybersecurity standards for internet of things devices.U.S. Sen. Mark Warner, (D-Va.) said Thursday that he favors an industry-based approach before seeking some form of government regulation of IoT security.“Last week’s attack does reveal