May 21, 2012 By Leave a Comment

One thing Osama bin Laden did right

I apologize for the delay in getting the next post out. I can assure you the CIA hasn’t had me assassinated. At least not yet, you never know what madness the US will try next.

Speaking of CIA sponsored assassination teams, what if I told you the former terrorist kingpin Osama bin Laden actually did something right?

I’m not going to try to defend his actions, that would be impossible. Instead, I’m going to tell you how to take a lesson out of his play book to help you keep a low profile.

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Filed Under: Threats
April 30, 2012 By Leave a Comment

If you thought SOPA was bad, you won’t believe this…

The friendly folks at the MPAA and RIAA were very disappointed to see their beloved SOPA bill fail to make its way all the way through the United States Congress. The MPAA/RIAA also realized just how powerful the tech industry can be when it unites behind a single cause. Websites were blacked out, protests were organized, and a massive amount of awareness was brought to bear to destroy SOPA.

I knew once SOPA failed that it wouldn’t be long before another horrible bill was brought before the US Congress.

I was right.

Normally I enjoy being right, but sometimes I make predictions that things will come to pass that I don’t like. Unfortunately this is one of them.

Enter CISPA.
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Filed Under: Digital Rights, Threats
April 22, 2012 By 4 Comments

If you aren’t paying for the product…

I’ve been exposed to some pretty shocking things about human behavior in my life. As a result, I’ve become pretty callous to most of the insanity I see every day in the world around me.

One of the things that never fails to blow my mind is how happy people are to trade their privacy for “free” stuff. Everyone wants free stuff. It’s human nature to want to minimize our costs.

We often don’t realize what we are trading for those free services. Companies don’t provide services for free out of the kindness of their heart. Someone has to be paying the bills!

If you aren’t paying for the product, you are the product being sold.

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Filed Under: Threats
April 18, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Installing and Using TrueCrypt on Mac OSX

Truecrypt is one of my favorite applications. It makes encrypting your files so easy that you could teach your grandma to do it (just try). It has a ton going for it: it’s free, open source, and it’s available on all the major operating systems. TrueCrypt works by creating a virtual encrypted disk within a file and mounting it as a real disk in order to encrypt the file’s contents. By doing this, TrueCrypt is able to encrypt a file, directory, partition, or entire storage device. TrueCrypt also includes both an access password and a decryption key in order to provide files with more security than other encryption methods, causing encrypted files to show only random data until they have been decrypted. TrueCrypt is advantageous because it provides real time encryption without slowing down the CPU, so you won’t even notice that it’s running. TrueCrypt also provides parallelization and pipelining to increase the access speed to encrypted files. Another great advantage of TrueCrypt, if configured properly and used with full disk encryption, is that it can provide plausible deniability to any user who has been forced to reveal his/her password. So let’s get right into it… [Read more...]
Filed Under: Disk Encryption, Tutorials
April 13, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Installing and Using TrueCrypt on Windows 7

Truecrypt is one of my favorite applications. It makes encrypting your files so easy that you could teach your grandma to do it (just try). It has a ton going for it: it’s free, open source, and it’s available on all the major operating systems.

TrueCrypt works by creating a virtual encrypted disk within a file and mounting it as a real disk in order to encrypt the file’s contents. By doing this, TrueCrypt is able to encrypt a file, directory, partition, or entire storage device. TrueCrypt also includes both an access password and a decryption key in order to provide files with more security than other encryption methods, causing encrypted files to show only random data until they have been decrypted. TrueCrypt is advantageous because it provides real time encryption without slowing down the CPU, so you won’t even notice that it’s running. TrueCrypt also provides parallelization and pipelining to increase the access speed to encrypted files.

Another great advantage of TrueCrypt, if configured properly and used with full disk encryption, is that it can provide plausible deniability to any user who has been forced to reveal his/her password.

So let’s get right into it…

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Disk Encryption, Tutorials
April 9, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Encrypt your Dropbox with BoxCryptor

In my previous post, I talked about how Dropbox, although it’s a great service, has some serious flaws.

I’ve created this tutorial for you to show you how to easily use BoxCryptor on Windows 7 to encrypt your Dropbox and keep it safe from prying eyes. Although this is written for Windows 7, the process is largely the same from Windows XP and Vista.

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Filed Under: Cloud, Disk Encryption, Tutorials
April 9, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Security flaws with Dropbox and how to fix it

Dropbox is the simplest, most elegant file synchronization tool I’ve ever used. The premise behind Dropbox is that it gives you access to your files remotely no matter what computer or device you have at hand. The service stores files that you choose on Dropbox’s servers and lets you get at your files quickly, easily, and elegantly from virtually any Internet-enabled device.

Dropbox is both a downloadable product, with a version for every major operating system—Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS, Android, BlackBerry—and every user also gets a Web account with file access, too, just in case you’re on a computer that doesn’t have Dropbox installed.

Dropbox is truly a fantastic service, but it has its drawbacks. Before I go too deeply into this, I want to briefly explain the inherent security issues present in so many cloud storage and synchronization providers.

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Filed Under: Cloud
April 6, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Apple’s Master Key

Do you use any Apple products like an iPhone, iPad, or Macbook? Last summer Apple announced their new iCloud offering to much fanfare at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference. It’s certainly a solid piece of software, and promises much. What’s not to love about being able to take a picture on your iPhone and have it instantly available on your Macbook Pro? Or purchase a video on your Macbook and pick up your iPad to watch it? Synchronizing contacts and emails across all devices? Awesome! But there is one crucial security problem hiding behind all of these glorious features: Apple has the master key. To all of this. They can see everything you upload to iCloud.

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Filed Under: Disk Encryption
April 2, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Did they steal your credit card information?

Late last Friday March 31st, US based credit card processor Global Payments Inc. revealed that they had been the target of a sustained attack on their systems from January 21 to February 25 of 2012. Real information was scarce over the weekend, but late Sunday night Global Payments revealed that as many as 1.5 million accounts were compromised. Apparently they realized in early March that some credit card data had been accessed, but didn’t disclose this publicly until a few days ago.

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Filed Under: Finance
March 29, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Let’s go Phishing… for bank accounts

Thanks to the internet, managing a bank account has become incredibly convenient. Many of us are happy to make use of things as convenient as the online banking services offered by whichever financial institution we entrust finances with. Being able to access your bank account from anywhere in the world has revolutionized the way we do things, especially when it comes to business. Unfortunately, managing your bank account online comes with a risk. That risk: being “phished”. The term is used to describe fraudulent attempts to steal your information. Millions of people have experienced the hassle and annoyance of suddenly finding their bank account being compromised due to a phishing attack. Being aware of the risks involved with online banking is a proper step in knowing how to keep your information secure.

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Filed Under: Scams, Social Engineering, Threats
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