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Robert Siciliano

Security Analyst

Safr.me

Member since

04 Feb 2009

Location

Boston

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Robert's opinions

Securing New Digital Devices

Laptops, desktops, Macs, mobiles, and tablets are on many people’s wish lists this holiday season. Once these shiny new devices are connected to the Internet, they will be under siege by malware created by criminals in order to steal identities. According to a recent McAfee survey, 60% of consumers now own at least three digital devices, and 25% ow...

21 December 2011 /security /regulation

Managing Family Time On The iPad or iPhone

On our way home from a recent family vacation, my two year old grew understandably anxious and uncooperative while waiting for a flight in an airport terminal. So I handed over my iPhone, hoping to distract her. Within seconds, she had launched the photo application and begun scrolling through the videos of our trip. She’d watch a video, giggle a ...

16 December 2011 /security /regulation

Human Security Weaker Than IT Security

Information technologies have evolved to a level at which the developers, programmers, and security specialists all know what they’re doing, and are able to produce products and services that work and are reasonably secure. Of course, there’s always room for improvement. Despite the amount of criminal hacking that goes on, users who effectively im...

14 November 2011 /security /regulation

Searching for Hotties Leads to Hacked PCs

Five or ten years ago, it was relatively easy for scammers to trick people into opening email attachments that would launch malicious programs on victims’ PCs. Nowadays, most email providers won’t permit .exe attachments, so viruses may be saved as compressed files, or hidden behind links that appear to lead to PDFs or word documents. Scammers hav...

04 November 2011 /security /regulation

What Are Your Digital Assets Worth?

Digital assets include: entertainment files (e.g. music downloads), personal memories (e.g. photographs), personal communications (e.g. emails), personal records (e.g. health, financial, insurance), and career information (e.g. resumes, portfolios, cover letters, contacts), as well as any creative projects or hobbies involving digital files. If yo...

13 October 2011 /security /regulation

Think You Are Protected Think Again

In 1990, when only the government and a number of universities were using the Internet, there were 357 unique pieces of malware. The need for security began with desktop computing when the only means of compromising data was by inserting a contaminated floppy disk into a PC or opening an infected email attachment. That was the anti-virus era. The ...

02 October 2011 /security /regulation

Hackers Target Small Business

Big companies and big government get big press when their data is breached. And when a big company is hit, those whose accounts have been compromised are often notified. With smaller businesses, however, victims are often left in the dark, regardless of the various state laws requiring notification. One reason for this is that smaller businesses t...

19 September 2011 /security /regulation

How Is All This Hacking Affecting My Identity?

Without question, 2011 is the year for hackers of all kinds to get their 15 minutes of fame. But it feels like it’s lasting a lot longer than 15 minutes. With so many different breeds of hackers, each with their own agenda and an endless supply of potential targets, the media has certainly been more than willing to give them all the attention they...

16 September 2011 /security /regulation

Bill Would Remove Social Security Numbers

The most basic advice for protecting your own identity is to protect your Social Security number. The obvious solution is simply never to disclose your number, but this is silly, since, depending on your age, you have probably provided it to hundreds of people, on hundreds of forms. It now sits in hundreds of databases, accessible to thousands, an...

26 August 2011 /security /regulation

Researchers Say Identity Theft Has Lasting

Identity theft victims don’t need Jessica Van Vliet, an assistant professor in counseling psychology at the University of Alberta, to tell them that they no longer feel safe when conducting everyday financial transactions, which most of us take for granted. But she did a study highlighting a fact that many of us in the industry have already known:...