Steven Pressman

We covered a range of topics over the past several weeks. If you missed some (or all) of them see the summaries below, and click to learn more. Passwords: How to Make the Best of a Bad Situation Love ’em or hate ’em, passwords are a part of digital life. Learn how these 5 simple rules can reduce your chance of compromise. How to Avoid the Ransomware Terror The Dastardly evil-doer has taken your system hostage. Do you pay the ransom, or lose your files forever? Learn about a third option in our ransomware article. How to Protect Against Phishing…

This is the second article in our 10-part series for National Cybersecurity Awareness Month. Look for new cybersecurity topics explained by Alpine Cyber experts every Tuesday and Thursday in October. Behold the Villain – Now in Digital Form “We have your family. We want $2,000,000 in unmarked $2 bills; in a tan duffel bag; in the Logan Square Fountain by 9:00 PM…or you’ll never see them again.” We’ve all seen this movie.  Dastardly evil-doer holds something precious over our dashing hero’s head demanding ungodly sums of money for its release. Sadly, this is no longer limited to Hollywood schlock suspense…

Do you think all of the bad guys are sitting in smoke-filled rooms in the Chinese war ministry?  Do you think your network is safe if you prevent people from getting to the Internet too openly?  Ah, if only that were true.  The fact of the matter is that one of your biggest vulnerabilities is sitting among you.  Some are malicious and some are accidental.  Some researchers believe that the percentage of incidents due to insider threats may be as high as 55%! Long story short — the average user is a significant source of your IT and data security risk….

You’ve heard it before — from us and from, well, pretty much everyone who values security. Patch your systems. If you don’t, you are not secure. It’s as simple as that. As if we needed more reminding of this global truism, Microsoft just released a new patch for a critical vulnerability in their DNS service. To an average Joe, if they even know what DNS is, this is an entirely unimpressive patch. But to those in the know, this is huge! Nerdy Version: This is a remote code execution vulnerability. The attacker can execute whatever they want on the affected…

Last week, Jeremy Wheeler blogged about the perils of public charging stations. This got me thinking about some of the other ills of convenient, public life. One glaring convenient evil jumped out at me — public WiFi. We have all been there. You’re on your laptop or tablet, and you have to get some work done. Or you desperately need to set your fantasy football lineup. Or you need to get an e-mail out. Whatever the circumstance, your only choice for connectivity seems to be the coffee shop’s free public connection. So you do what’s natural – you connect, get the…