Sometimes Google takes a heavy-handed approach to security, but it's also widely accepted that their heart is in the right place. That seems to be the case with the company's most recently announced change. In the near future, the search giant is going to start pushing Gmail and Google account holders to use two-factor authentication (2FA) by automatically enrolling them...
Microsoft has a history of being notoriously slow to change. Just to cite one example, the company's venerable "Paint" application has been in the mix since the earliest days of Windows. Although it was relatively feature-poor and under-powered even back when it was introduced, the company never made any effort to improve on it. They only recently gave it a...
A new, high severity vulnerability has been found in Qualcomm's MSM (Mobile Station Modem) chips, including the company's latest 5G-capable versions. The security issue could allow hackers to access a user's call history, text messages, and even listen in on their conversations. Unfortunately, given the ubiquity of these chips in today's smartphones, this flaw impacts some 40 percent of the...
There's an ongoing, global scale phishing attack you should be aware of, even if your firm isn't currently being targeted by it. The attack is being tracked by Mandiant, who recently published a report about it. According to that report, the attack was planned in waves, hitting more than 50 different organizations spanning a broad range of industries. These attacks...
On April 20, 2021, Google released Chrome 90.0.4430.85, designed to address a zero-day exploit hackers are currently taking advantage of, tracked as CVE-2021-21224. The patch also patches four other high severity security flaws that had previously been plaguing the most popular browser on the web. By the time you read these words, the latest version will be available for Windows,...
Recently, researchers at Qihoo 360 Network Security discovered a particularly stealthy piece of malware designed to create backdoors in the Linux ecosystem. It was so good at its job, and so stealthy that it went completely undetected for years. That gave the hackers controlling it a convenient access point literally for years. Based on the company's research, the first sample...
If you're still using Skype for Business at your firm, be advised that Microsoft recently sent another friendly reminder out to all users of the service. The reminder says that it's going away as of July 31, 2021, so you'll need to complete your migration to Microsoft Teams (or an instance of Skype for Business Server), or have some other...
QNAP recently addressed a critical security vulnerability you need to be aware of. Previous to the fix, the company had included hard-coded credentials to serve as a backdoor to the device. Unfortunately, hackers became aware of this and began abusing those credentials. That resulted in a number of confirmed instances where hackers gained access to the device via the backdoor,...
Geico, the second largest insurance carrier in the US, recently became the latest high-profile company to suffer a data breach in the United States. The company is the second largest auto insurance carrier in the US, with more than 17 million policies in effect, covering more than 28 million vehicles around the country. Based on the results of the ongoing...
If you're a Microsoft Edge user, be aware. Beginning in July, with the release of Edge 92, the browser will automatically redirect users to a secure HTTPS connection any time they visit a website via the HTTP protocol. Microsoft is not alone in this, and in fact, is coming a bit late to the party. Chrome 90, released earlier this...
