By Bob Lord, CISO

A recent investigation by Yahoo has confirmed that a copy of certain user account information was stolen from the company’s network in late 2014 by what it believes is a state-sponsored actor. The account information may have included names, email addresses, telephone numbers, dates of birth, hashed passwords (the vast majority with bcrypt) and, in some cases, encrypted or unencrypted security questions and answers.

It's the relationship you spend more time on than any other. It deepens every year. And when things go wrong, you become afraid, tearful, and in some cases so enraged that you lash out by throwing things, but you're willing to go right back into the relationship no matter what happens.

Widget buyer Ms. Robinson testified that Mr. Smith, the Widgets Corp. sales manager, told her that if she put her order in immediately, the price would be discounted by 20 percent. Mr. Smith argued that that was not what he said. According to his testimony, he agreed to give a 20 percent discount only if Ms. Robinson ordered at least one million widgets, which she did not. The widgets were manufactured and delivered, and the client was billed for the full amount. The client is refusing to pay the full amount and the manufacturing company is throwing it to a collection agency. If brought into a court of law, who would be right?

When you are ready to buy a new computer, one of the first questions you may ask yourself is, “Where can I get the best deal?”
Obviously you don’t want to pay more than you have to, but there are other considerations besides price that you should consider before making your decision.

If you ever make purchases online, you must know how to quickly determine if the website you are about to buy from is secure.
A secure connection is an encrypted exchange of information between the website you are visiting and the browser you are using. Encryption of data is simply a process of converting the information you type in (your name, address, and credit card number) into an unreadable format that only the receiving website can decipher.

Thousands of viruses are currently circulating on the Internet with more being discovered daily. So how does a virus get its name?
There is no official government body or organization that names viruses. In most cases, the anti-virus company that discovers it gets to name it; and, it’s a very competitive race to see who can discover new viruses first!

If you shop online (and these days, who doesn’t?), you’ll want to make sure you use a credit card instead of a debit card to protect yourself from online scams and rip offs. The biggest advantage credit cards offer is a buffer for payment. By law, your maximum loss if your credit card number is stolen is $50, and most credit card companies and banks will cover the entire cost.

Offsite backups have been touted in the past few years as the answer to everyone’s bad habit of not doing backups. Once signed up for an online service it’s easy to ‘set it and forget it;’ but too many business owners don’t know what they are buying and end up paying a lot more than they should. They also end up shocked when they discover they weren’t backing up the right files or that they can’t restore the files as quickly as they had hoped.

Now that school is back in, thousands of children will be surfing the Internet to conduct research, chat with new school mates, and complete homework assignments.

Although the Internet provides a tremendous learning tool for children, left unchecked it can also expose them to inappropriate material and unscrupulous individuals looking to exploit innocent children.

You regularly back up your computers (or at least you should), but do you do the same with your smartphone? Given the massive amounts of contact information, photos, videos and other data we all carry around on smartphones, it's critical to back them up or risk losing all that data forever.