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Password for life? Yeah, maybe…

I just read an interesting blog post over on http://www.baekdal.com/tips/password-security-usability which gives a good case for not using random letters, numbers, case and special characters… The writer claims the password of “this is fun” would take about 2500 years to hack. Most business security policies require passwords that are a minimum of 8 characters, with upper and lower case, numbers and …

Secure IT Alert: Microsoft Patch Tuesday is Coming – Strap In! Lots of Updates!

Homeland Secure IT Alert for Monday, April 11th, 2011 You’ve waited a whole month for this, and Microsoft has not let you down.  Updates galore are ‘a comin’ tomorrow, April 12th, 2011. The Microsoft Security Bulletin Advance Notification states that this Patch Tuesday will be a big one. A total of 17 fixes, addressing 64 security vulnerabilities are there for …

Bogus Intuit QuickBooks Online Warnings Via Email Lead to Infection

Watch out for emails from Intuit and other software and service providers that appear to be legitimate and make sense on the surface… I was told by one of our friends/clients today that they had become infected after receiving an email from “software@quickbooks.com” which read something like this: Subject: QuickBooks Update: Urgent <Official Intuit QuickBooks Online logo here> You will …

Trend Micro Worry-Free Business Security Critical Patch 1417

Trend Micro released Critical Patch 1417 for Worry-Free Business Security last week which includes previous patches and corrects known issues. Businesses running Trend Micro WFBS should update to insure reliable operation of their anti-virus solution.  For a full list of issues addressed see the Trend Micro download site. If you require assistance or wish to purchase Trend Micro products in …

Patch your Mac, patch your Windows, patch your Microsoft Groove too… #patches

  Homeland Secure IT Alert for Thursday, March 10, 2011 It has been patch city this past week… Let’s start off with the Mac stuff for a change…   Apple Mac OS X 10.5.x (Leopard) and 10.6.x (Snow Leopard) are the subject of two Apple security advisories which warn of 16 vulnerabilities in OS X’s Java components. Apple simply states …

Ditch the WiFi and go with 3g or 4g broadband connectivity for your mobile devices

Those of you who are using a notebook computer or mobile device such as an iPad, iPhone, Android or Android tablet and connecting to those public free wifi access hotspots may want to just ditch the WiFi after what I heard about today… In spite of what I said about safe browsing from public wi-fi hotspots using a VPN a …

Mozilla Firefox 3.6.15 released – Fixes Java Bug introduced in 3.6.14 last week…

About a week ago (03-02-2011), Mozilla released Firefox update 3.6.14 designed to patch a number of security issues, then they turned around and released Mozilla Firefox 3.6.15 designed to correct a Java bug that presumably introduced in the 3.6.14 update. The Java applet loading bug does not appear to create new security vulnerabilities, so you should be secure if you …

Secure IT Alert: Microsoft Patches Coming along with Mozilla Firefox Update for Windows, Mac & Linux

Homeland Secure IT Alert for Thursday, March 3, 2011 Microsoft issued the Advance Notification for March 2011 and today… The full version of the Microsoft Security Bulletin Advance Notification for March 2011 can be found at http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/bulletin/ms11-mar.mspx. The advanced notification will be replaced with the March bulletin summary on March 8, 2011. On the Critical list are updates for remote code execution …

BlackHole RAT malware especially for you Mac OS X owners

A computer security post on TGDaily.com entitled, “BlackHole RAT Trojan targets Mac OS X” discusses Mac’s very own variant of a Microsoft Windows Remote Access Tool (RAT) called darkComet. The Mac version is known as “BlackHole RAT” and it is not quite ready for prime time, though it seems to offer a great stepping stone to be used to target the …