In a week or two (or 3 or 4), I’ll be leaving on at least two months of maternity leave. Short/Long term leave is a pretty common scenario, whether for maternity leave, disability, or a sabbatical. People who have accounts and company knowledge are just “gone” for extended periods of time. Sometime, there’s advance notice, sometimes there’s not. What can you (or your company) do to make the transition easier from a security perspective? Availability is one area of security – aka business continuity. If you know you’re leaving for an extended period of time, let your employer know as soon as reasonable. I know for maternity leave, many women and their partners wait until after the first trimester –[…]
Here are 5 New Year Security Resolutions that may be useful to adopt in 2011. 1) Upgrade your password swagger Several security incidents involving leaked passwords occurred in 2010. As long as passwords continue to be ubiquitous to single-factor security online, they will be huge targets for attackers. Beef up your account security by using different passwords for different accounts. Use a password manager to organize them, and use randomly generated passwords to make it hard for an attacker to guess their way in. Even starting a simple password rotation schedule for your own accounts can add some decent protection against password breaches. 2) Keep up with updates and patches It’s not ideal to postpone things that are time-sensitive and[…]
My name isn’t common, but there’s at least one other person with that name. And he’s not at all careful about email addresses. I’ve had email from him in the past – or, rather, from organizations to whom he’s given my email address. I feel as if I know him. I know where he went to school; I know who he works for. I know who he donates money to. I think I even saw his birthday in one of the emails. And now I know he lost his passport.
Back in 2007 a group of American hackers went to Germany and toured this esoteric place known as a hacker space. They liked what they saw and quickly founded the first hacker spaces in the United States. The goal was to set up collective spaces where curious types could come in and work on personal and group projects, often involving equipment that isn’t feasible to have in your living room. Cut to the end of 2010 and hacker spaces are established all over the globe, with the United States completely obscured by red balloons on the hacker spaces map. Since the beginning, hacker spaces has grown into a phenomenon in its own right. There are panels on hacker spaces at[…]
Forget about everything that’s been made of password strength; it’s a red herring. True, you shouldn’t be using one common password across all sites, but that’s not a password selection issue. Should you pick good quality passwords that aren’t easily guessable? Absolutely. That being said, let’s forget about the rest of the rules, with perhaps the exception of length, and talk a bit about what actually happened with Gawker.
How do you use a different strong password on every site without writing all of those passwords down or going mad – a password manager with randomly generated passwords. I have several machines I use on a very regular basis – both for work and personal use: at least one desktop and one laptop in each case, and then occasional use on my iPhone. So any password manager for me would have to work among all of these machines. In my case, they’re all OS X, but these tools work on Windows as well if you’re stuck using it 🙂 I use 1Password syncing with Dropbox. Dropbox synchronizes files between computer systems – Windows and OS X, and even iPhone,[…]