ComputerWorld – Page 60 – Computer Security Articles

Credit to Author: JR Raphael| Date: Thu, 21 Nov 2019 09:21:00 -0800

I don’t know if you’ve read much news this week, but it seems the sky is falling and we’re all terribly doomed.

No, I’m not talking about that news — as usual, that’s another column for another publication — but rather the news that a security flaw in some Android camera apps could turn our phones into privacy-plundering spy portals and bring an end to human life as we know it.

I mean, have you seen some of these headlines?!

“Hundreds of millions of Android phone cameras can be hijacked by spyware”
“Android flaw lets rogue apps take photos, record video even if your phone is locked”
“An Android flaw lets apps secretly access people’s cameras and upload the videos to an external server”

Holy hibiscus, Henry! Even I’m trembling from all of that, and I know it’s a bunch of misguided, sensationalized hooey.

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ComputerWorld Independent

November 21, 2019 admin

Throwback Thursday: See if you can wriggle out of this one

Credit to Author: Sharky| Date: Thu, 21 Nov 2019 06:00:00 -0800

It’s several years ago during a major virus outbreak — if you know your history of computer viruses, you can narrow it down — and a user at a remote site calls this pilot fish to complain that her computer won’t let her get any work done.

“I asked her if she had called the local technician — who worked for me — and she replied that she had called him numerous times but he had not picked up his phone,” says fish. “I told her I would take care of it.”

Fish calls his tech, who says he has spoken to the user each time she called and explained to her that he’ll help her as soon as he can, but he’s finishing work in another area.

That satisfies fish, who goes back to his own work. And soon he gets a message from his tech, sent from the irate user’s email account, reporting that the tech checked the user’s PC, found a virus and removed it, and updated the PC’s virus definitions. Case closed.

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ComputerWorld Independent

November 20, 2019 admin

Facebook's iOS 'bug' secretly filmed users. IT, take note.

Credit to Author: Evan Schuman| Date: Wed, 20 Nov 2019 09:41:00 -0800

News reports last week — subsequently confirmed by a Facebook executive’s tweet — that the Facebook iOS app was videotaping users without notice should serve as a critical heads up to enterprise IT and security execs that mobile devices are every bit as risky as they feared. And a very different bug, planted by cyberthieves, presents even more frightening camera-spying issues with Android.

On the iOS issue, the confirmation tweet from Guy Rosen, who is Facebook’s vice president of Integrity (go ahead and insert whatever joke you want about Facebook having a vice president of integrity; for me, it’s way too easy a shot), said, “We recently discovered our iOS app incorrectly launched in landscape. In fixing that last week in v246, we inadvertently introduced a bug where the app partially navigates to the camera screen when a photo is tapped. We have no evidence of photos/videos uploaded due to this.”

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ComputerWorld Independent

November 20, 2019 admin

Security lessons from a Mac-only fintech company

Credit to Author: Jonny Evans| Date: Wed, 20 Nov 2019 07:43:00 -0800

Apple remains a highly secure choice for enterprise professionals, but security threats remain and the environment requires sophisticated endpoint management tools, confirmed Build America Mutual (BAM) CTO, David McIntyre.

The Mac only bank

BAM is one of the leading U.S. municipal bond insurers and has insured over $65 billion since launch in 2012. It also has the rare distinction of being a fintech firm that is completely based on Macs.

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ComputerWorld Independent

November 20, 2019 admin

How make a Windows disaster recovery kit

Make your own disaster checklist and recovery toolkit before trouble happens.

ComputerWorld Independent

November 19, 2019 admin

Microsoft starts releasing fixes for Access bugs introduced in Office security patches this month

Credit to Author: Woody Leonhard| Date: Tue, 19 Nov 2019 06:09:00 -0800

Although we’ve been promised no “C” or “D” week second cumulative updates for the rest of the year — at least for Windows — Microsoft has acknowledged a bug it created in last week’s Patch Tuesday Office patches, and now promises that it’ll update the bad fixes on most machines this week or next. Those are “C” week and “D” week, respectively.

The cause du jour: a bug in all of this month’s Office security patches that throws an error in Access saying, “Query xxxx is corrupt,” when in fact the query in question is just fine. Microsoft describes the erroneous error message on its Office Support site:

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ComputerWorld Independent

November 18, 2019 admin

Mobile security perceptions don't approach reality. And that's a problem.

Credit to Author: Evan Schuman| Date: Mon, 18 Nov 2019 07:44:00 -0800

In general, security vendors love consumer surveys where consumers say that they would never, ever, ever do business with a retailer or a bank with poor security practices. But consumers have historically been terrible predictors of their own behavior, and they also tend to tell retailers and banks what they want to hear, rather than the truth.

And the truth, based on the public financial filings of plenty of companies that have suffered public data breaches, is that consumers — partially thanks to zero liability programs from the payment card companies — tend to not change retailers or banks when such data breaches happen. Why? Quite a few reasons. First, zero liability sees to it that they don’t lose any money (it actually limits losses to $50, but almost no business enforces that, and they tend to simply eat all of the consumer losses). If consumers lost large amounts of money from breached retailers or banks, yes, they’d flee, but that doesn’t happen.

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ComputerWorld Independent

November 15, 2019 admin

What you need to know about new data-security rules for business travel

Credit to Author: Mike Elgan| Date: Fri, 15 Nov 2019 07:39:00 -0800

From U.S. Customs agents to cybercriminals, everyone wants to copy the data on your phone and laptop. Here’s how to protect your rights and also avoid industrial espionage.