Showing posts with label Online Banking. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Online Banking. Show all posts

October 20, 2014

Shining A Light On Your Privacy


Check out this special report...

~Half a billion~ downloads of the top 10 Flashlights Apps--the ones we all have on our smartphones--and guess what?

All/most are malware/spyware from China, India, and Russia that are spying on you!

Your contacts, banking information, even your location, is being intercepted by hackers abroad,

The cybersecurity experts Snoopwall (that conducted this study and are offering a free opensource "privacy flashlight") are recommending that you don't just uninstall these flashlight apps, because they leave behind trojans that still are functioning behind the scene and capturing your information. 

So instead doing a backup of key information and then a factory reset of the smartphone is advised.

Pain in the you know what, but these flashlight apps are shining a light and compromising your personal information.

Snopes points out that the flashlight apps may be no more vulnerable to spyware than other apps you download and that perhaps the screening process from the app stores help to protect us somewhat.

When the cyber hackers decide to exploit those apps that are vulnerable, whether for political, military, or financial gain, it will likely be ugly and that flashlight or other app you use may prove much more costly than the download to get them. ;-)

(Thank you Betty Monoker for sharing this.)
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March 6, 2014

Beware of Botnets



Interesting video demonstration of how botnets work and can literally take over your computer.

In essence, your computer becomes a zombie under the command and control of the botnet sender.

Computers get infected through a trojan or worm, and then the sender has you--they control your computer and information.

Generally, they do this to send spam, steal information, or send out other malware, all under anonymity. 

Once infected, the sender has complete control over your computer and can exfiltrate, delete, or change your data, turn on the keyboard lights, add a tail to your mouse, and even format your hard drive. 

The malware often can even disable your firewall.

The sender can turn on a keylogger and log your keystrokes, and capture your user ids and passwords to banking and financial institutions, and draw out your money. 

The video demos an example of botnets with a variant of the Zeus trojan. 

Worth a watch.

Makes me wonder whether our adversaries are infecting more and more computers, until they have almost everyone--eventually a virtual army.

Then at the time of their choosing, they can conduct one big massive attack, or incremental ones, logging into peoples accounts, stealing their identities and savings, sending out misinformation, destroying data and computers en masse. 

We need to be aware of what's possible, maybe even probable. 

Is your computer infected and you don't even know it yet?
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February 25, 2014

What A Waste Of Coin

Coming to work this week, I saw a penny on the ground...then another...and another.

I saw people passing the money, and instead of picking it up, they kicked in off the curb.

That's even worse than throwing them into the fountain where at least you might get some good luck from it. 

Thus, the state of our minting of coinage--it's essentially worthless.

After getting a pretty basic Venti Java Chip at Starbucks for a whopping $5.45, I quickly calculated, I would need 545 pennies,109 nickles, 54.5 dimes, or 21.8 quarters o pay for this--how ridiculous!  

And uh, how many of these would you need to pay someone one hour at the new proposed minimum wage of $10.10 if you did it in coins?

Otherwise, I could just give them a credit or debit card--yes, sort of a no brainer, right?

Why do we keep making coinage that no one wants or needs in the digital age?

We have direct deposit for payroll, automatic deductions for many expenses, online banking, ecommerce , credit and debit cards, paypal, and even bitcoin...let's just be honest and admit it, traditional money is basically obsolete. 

At Starbucks, I see many people now just use their Smartphone App to pay and get rewards--another advance. 

Someday soon, we will have embedded chips that simply add and deduct payments as we go along and live life--it's really not all that complicated. 

The funny thing also is that it costs more to make many coins then their intrinsic worth--and hence the drive towards making coins with cheaper materials. 

According to Business Insider, in 2012, a penny cost 2.4 cents to make and a nickle 11.2 cents--quite a losing proposition. 

While there truly are some valuable coins out there and I appreciate that there are many coin lovers and collectors--numismatists--perhaps there are alternate hobbies to consider. 

A colleague once told me that "If you watch your pennies, the dollars will follow"--and that may be some good investement advice, but in a 24/7 society and after decades of inflation, there isn't enough time or room to collect all the pennies we would need to make much of a difference. 

ABC News reports that while our northern brother, Canada, got rid of the penny in 2012, we still make something like 5 billion of these useless things a year. 

Full disclosure: my first job in Washington, D.C. was for the U.S. Mint, and while there were good things about it, I could never feel good about the mission--it just had no purpose. ;-)

All Opinions my own.

(Source Photo: here with attribution to Maura Teague)
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