Home | Solutions Blog | John Sileo
Posts tagged "John Sileo"
Holiday Security Tips: On the second day of Christmas, the experts gave to me, 2 shopping tips…
Black Friday and Cyber Monday will be here before you can say “Man, I ate a lot of turkey!” Malls, stores, restaurants and cafés are exceptionally busy places during the holidays. This breeds a perfect environment for data thieves to make off with your identity goodies while you shop, dine or relax. It only takes a second to steal a purse from a shopping cart, a briefcase from your car or a smartphone, iPad or laptop from an unattended café table. Solution: Lighten your load and leave excess identity at home.
- Consider taking only your mobile phone, driver’s license and one or two credit cards with you shopping to minimize the number of identity storage devices you might misplace. If you can fit the items in your pockets, your security increases. If you must have a purse, use one that zips and hangs in front of you, or consider using a backpack that stays on you at all times.
Posted in Identity Theft Prevention, Video Tips by Identity Theft Speaker John Sileo.
Tags: “Holiday ID Theft”, “Online scams”, “Prevent Identity Theft”, “Preventing Identity Theft”, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, holiday, Holiday Identity Theft, Holiday Scams, holiday security tips, Holiday Shopping, John Sileo, Sileo
Holiday Security Tips: On the first day of Christmas, my expert gave to me, the keys to secure my privacy.
If I could give the world a gift this holiday season, it would be to make the world a safer place to trust. You deserve to know whether or not you can trust the politicians you elect, the advice you receive from your doctor and whether or not you can entrust your privacy to the websites and businesses you use every day.
Identity theft, cyber stalking, and “big data” surveillance—these byproducts of the information economy make it hard to rest easy. Every day in the news we hear about another scam, another breach of corporate data that victimizes more than 11 million Americans a year. But you don’t have to be a statistic!
Solution: Give yourself a gift by paying attention to prevention.
Posted in Identity Theft Prevention by Identity Theft Speaker John Sileo.
Tags: “Holiday ID Theft”, “How to Prevent Identity Theft”, “Online scams”, “Prevent Identity Theft”, “Preventing Identity Theft”, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, holiday, Holiday Identity Theft, Holiday Scams, holiday security tips, Holiday Shopping, John Sileo, Sileo
USPS Breach is Latest Security Leakage.
The United States Postal Service ran an ad about how much safer your data is if you use the mail service. Some of the catch phrases include, “A refrigerator has never been hacked. An online virus has never attacked a corkboard.” It goes on to assure you that conducting your daily business using the Postal Service will protect you from the dangers of using modern conveniences. Or not…USPS has been hacked. Were they inviting the attack?
The good news about the USPS breach is that the cyber thieves didn’t appear to get too much volume (less than a million records); the bad news is that it included the gold standard of identity (SSNs):
- Up to 800,000 employees may have had their names, dates of birth, Social Security numbers, addresses, emergency contacts and other information exposed.
Posted in Cyber Data Security by Identity Theft Speaker John Sileo.
Tags: "USPS Breach", John Sileo, Sileo
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHD2eWg9Cxk&rel=0]
Android flashlight apps harvesting your data for marketing & cyber crime.
You LOVE that flashlight app you have on your smartphone, right? Whether you’re in that dark restaurant with a size 2.5 font or wanting to share your love at a concert or finding your keys in your purse…you wonder, how did you ever live without it?
Well, it turns out the creators of that wonderful app love it, too, because it has become a way for them to get ahold of your personal data to use or sell.
Android devices seem to be especially vulnerable. Snoopbit studied the top ten Android flashlight apps and discovered that every one of them collects unnecessary user data and accesses areas of the device completely unrelated to the purpose of the app. This includes having the ability to read phone status and identity, view Wi-Fi connections, modify system settings, obtain full network access, and determine your precise location via your phone’s GPS, among other permissions.
Posted in Identity Theft Prevention by Identity Theft Speaker John Sileo.
Tags: John Sileo, Sileo
What does cybergeddon have to do with ebola?
In 2014 Ebola has claimed over 4,000 lives in Western Africa and caused ONE death (of a person who contracted the disease in Africa) in the United States. Many Americans are in a proper panic about it and it continues to be front page news. In typical fashion, we have found something to worry about while conveniently ignoring other, “less sensational” but more critical topics:
- According to the CDC, Influenza kills about 3,000 people in this country in a good year (1986-1987) and up to nearly 50,000 in a bad one (2003-2004). Yet during the 2013-2014 flu season, only 46 percent of Americans received vaccinations against influenza.
- Seat belts have saved an estimated 255,000 lives since 1975. Yet each year more than 50 percent of people killed in car crashes were not wearing a seat belt.
Posted in Cyber Data Security by Identity Theft Speaker John Sileo.
Tags: Cyber Security, cybergeddon, Ebola, John Sileo, Sileo
Did Edward Snowden Actually Comment on the Dropbox Breach? No.
Almost as fast as every media source out there could jump on the “Yet Another Breach” bandwagon and report that Dropbox had been hacked, the company was denying it. So let’s play a little game of true or false to try to sort out fact from fiction:
Statement: Hackers were able to access logins and passwords of Dropbox users and then leaked 400 account passwords and usernames on to the site Pastebin.
True.
Statement: The usernames and passwords referenced in these articles were stolen from unrelated services, not Dropbox. Attackers then used these stolen credentials to try to log in to sites across the Internet, including Dropbox.
True. (In fact that is a direct quote from the Dropbox blog of October 13, 2014 in which they bluntly proclaim “Dropbox wasn’t hacked”.)
Posted in Cyber Data Security, Online Privacy by Identity Theft Speaker John Sileo.
Tags: Dropbox, Dropbox Breach, John Sileo, Sileo, Snowden
The original notice on GameOver Zeus appeared on the US-CERT site. If you’d like to go directly to the tests for the GameOver Zeus virus, scroll down.
Overview of GameOver Zeus
GameOver Zeus (GOZ), a peer-to-peer (P2P) variant of the Zeus family of bank credential-stealing malware identified in September 2011, [1] uses a decentralized network infrastructure of compromised personal computers and web servers to execute command-and-control. The United States Department of Homeland Security (DHS), in collaboration with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Department of Justice (DOJ), is releasing this Technical Alert to provide further information about the GameOver Zeus botnet.
Systems Affected by GameOver Zeus Virus
- Microsoft Windows 95, 98, Me, 2000, XP, Vista, 7, and 8
- Microsoft Server 2003, Server 2008, Server 2008 R2, and Server 2012
Impact of GameOver Zeus
A system infected with GOZ may be employed to send spam, participate in DDoS attacks, and harvest users’ credentials for online services, including banking services.
Posted in Cyber Data Security, Identity Theft Prevention by Identity Theft Speaker John Sileo.
Tags: Cyber Security, Gameover, John Sileo, Virus, Zeus
Home Depot Data Breach Exposes Our Growing Complacency
When Target suffered a data breach back in December of 2013, you couldn’t look at a news source without seeing a new story about it. Yet when the Home Depot data breach was revealed recently, it received almost a ho-hum reception in the news. This, even though, it was the biggest data breach in retailing history and has compromised 56 million of its customers’ credit cards! It seems we have come to expect these data breaches to the point where we have become almost complacent.
Consumers, like the companies that breach our data, have become apocalyptic zombies, staring unquestioningly forward as we are attacked from all sides.
Posted in Cyber Data Security, Fraud Detection & Prevention by Identity Theft Speaker John Sileo.
Tags: "Home Depot Data Breach", "Home Depot", Cyber Security Expert, Data Breach, John Sileo, Sileo
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aVqJBizL90Y&rel=0]
Is Apple Pay going to be secure?
Apple has us ooing and ahhing about the iPhone 6, it’s big brother the 6+ and finally the Apple Watch. But the biggest announcement of all didn’t even have to do with gadgets. The most significant announcement was about a new service that will be built into those devices…
It is Apple Pay, Apple’s own version of a “mobile wallet” that will allow Apple users to pay for items with just a tap or wave of their device. That is if those items happen to be in stores that have agreed to install the technology necessary to allow near-field communication (NFC – no not the football conference, the radio-wave technology) to work. Of course, Apple has done the background work to ensure a lot of big names (MC, Visa, AMEX and retailers such as Target, Macy’s and McDonald’s to name a few) are already on board, which is a significant mark in their favor. And with the upcoming mandatory implementation of EMV technology, Apple may have just timed this perfectly.
Posted in Cyber Data Security, Identity Theft Prevention, Sileo In the News by Identity Theft Speaker John Sileo.
Tags: "Apple Pay", Cyber Security Speaker, John Sileo, Mobile Pay, Mobile Payments, Mobile Wallet, Sileo
