In late 2016 or early 2017, Bluetooth 5.0 will be released, and by all indications, this will be the version of the technology we’ve all been waiting for. It’s about to take a giant leap forward in terms of functionality.
At present, Bluetooth’s primary purpose is to wirelessly connect devices, and to track Bluetooth beacons, which are passive beacons that an open app on your phone can track.
Battery life for mobile devices is their single biggest weakness. The greatest challenge in growing and managing the exploding “Internet of Things” isn’t the devices themselves, but rather, the power required to wirelessly transmit the data they’re reporting.
Security researchers from Check Point have unearthed a new vulnerability dubbed QuadRoot that leaves potentially 900 million or more Android-based smartphones vulnerable. The attack manifests when a user unwittingly installs specially designed malware which executes the attack.
By now, it’s a familiar story. Conventional wisdom holds that you want to use a different password on every site or service you log into and that you want to change your passwords regularly, in order to maximize security. What if conventional wisdom isn’t true though? There’s a growing body of evidence that it isn’t.
Sometimes there can be too much of a good thing.
Ransomware has made some inroads into the realm of smart devices, but until quite recently, Android devices were the target of choice. That seems to be changing now. Increasingly, we’re seeing iPhone users targeted by this type of attack.
This particular attack can manifest when the hacker gains a user’s Apple ID account information.
In fact, your Microsoft Account Credentials are almost certainly vulnerable, but until the rise in popularity of Windows 10, it hasn’t been nearly as big an issue as it is today. The unfortunate reality is that Microsoft has known about the flaw in their software that allows this bug to function since 1997, and in all that time, no fix has been offered.
USB drives. They’re ubiquitous. They’re everywhere. You probably have several floating around your office, or nearby. We tend to use them so often that we don’t even think about it, and that’s a potential problem. At a recent Black Hat hacking convention, a demonstration was performed that proved just how easy it is to gain total control over just about any computer system, no matter how secure.
If you have a Yahoo email account, you’re not alone. The company is one of the largest free email account providers on the internet, which unfortunately means that when they suffer a data breach, it tends to impact a lot of users.
Back in 2012, Yahoo reported a data breach which they estimated impacted about 450,000 user accounts.
Banner Health, based in Phoenix, AZ, has the dubious honor as having been the recipient of the largest healthcare related data breach so far in 2016. The cyberattack was launched on June 17, and potentially impacts 3.7 million Banner Health patients.
Does your company currently have a formal email policy? If you don’t, you need one, and sooner, rather than later. As the first “killer app” in the world of computing, email is, to this day, one of the most widely used communications tools in business.
