Archive for February, 2010

Take my personal data, please!

Monday, February 22nd, 2010

A site called Please Rob Me has been created to highlight the problem that most people don’t make the connection between personal information and security. People are putting way too much information online through twitter and social networks. Note that I said ‘information’ – not just stuff like credit card numbers and other private data. Announcing to the public that you are not at home is like having a ‘kick me’ sign on your back. It’s even worse, because you put the sign on back yourself!

A few years ago, there was a rash of burglaries in the Washington D.C. area. All of the burglaries happened in the fall during football season. It was discovered that all the homes that had been burglarized had received anonymous tickets to watch the Redskins play. Redskins tickets were really hard to get, so many of the people who got the tickets went to the game. The bad guys then watched the homes that had received tickets and waited as the homes cleared out for the afternoon. The bad guys figured out that paying even hundreds of dollars for each ticket was a cheap investment compared to what they could steal from the homes. Many people who should have thought twice about the free tickets, didn’t give it a second thought and opened themselves to being violated by the burglars.

Online security is about more than passwords and secure online ordering. YOU are responsible for your security. Pattern your online behavior after your face-to-face interactions and you’ll be safer.

Check out this article in the BBC.

Peter L

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Good passwords and how to use them

Sunday, February 21st, 2010

More and more, we’re seeing attention being given to passwords and personal security. It seems obvious that passwords are an integral part of securing your personal data, but that part of the security message seems to have been glossed over until recently. Ever notice the strange looks you get from your friends or even the IT guy when they see you taking precautions to not reveal your passwords? If so, congratulations, you’re ahead of the curve on this one.

A lot of the recent articles and blogs are about creating really good passwords. Many of the ideas are sound: create a string of characters and numbers that you will remember but that can’t be easily guessed – not even by people who know you. Your password shouldn’t be a word or a set of consecutive numbers or letters, or a date, like your birth date or anniversary. (Since your pet’s name is presumably a word, it’s ruled out by default!)

So, now you have a great password – great! But what about the rest of the passwords you need for all those online accounts and applications? What’s that? You only have a couple. Really?

When I ask people about the number of passwords they have, most folks say something like ‘only a couple’, or ‘around 10’. No one ever says 30 or 50 – BUT when you ask them to really think about the number of email accounts (hotmail, yahoo, gmail, etc.), banks, e-commerce sites (amazon, zappos, Barnes & Noble, online department stores, and on and on), travel sites (Travelocity, orbitz, priceline, expedia, etc.) local and other government sites, not to mention blogs and other special interest sites, people are surprised to discover that they really have quite a few. Even your list just keeps getting longer and longer.

Keeping them all straight is a big part of safe password usage. That’s where the password manager comes in. It is very difficult to manage in your head all of the good and unique passwords that you’ll need for all of the sites you visit. If you are stressing and spending lots of energy hiding passwords in your datebook or in spreadsheets, you should consider Sticky Password. You’ll have a strong, unique password for each site and you’ll have access to them wherever you go.

Follow sound rules and create a strong password that you won’t forget and that no one is likely to guess: use that as your Master Password in Sticky Password. Let Sticky Password create and manage all your other passwords.

Peter L

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Online security and relationships – a bad mix!

Tuesday, February 16th, 2010

I hope you all enjoyed Valentine’s Day! After reading the previous post, I hope that you all included a note to your beloved in that box of chocolates in which you announced that you’ve changed your shared gmail password. :-) Here are a couple of articles that came out recently that highlight the fact that feelings and security often don’t mix.

In Broken hearts put holes in wallets – the author stresses that “[f]raudsters know that trust is the key to profiting from love”. The bad guys know that people are very likely to share private info including passwords and other data once a ‘relationship’ is built. It’s a game that takes time, but the bad guys have all the time it takes to use social networks to build a sense of trust and then to get your data. (I picture the bad guys sitting at computers with all sorts of chats going on simultaneously like the guys in the park who play several games of chess at once with the punch clock.) Make it your policy to not share your personal data with anyone and you’ll be much safer.

Black hat hackers on demand is scarier. Here we find out just how easy it is for someone you know to pay someone to do the dirty work: your ‘ex‘ pays a few bucks and soon you receive an invitation where you have to enter your password yourself. They pay the money and get your password and access information. Here’s where your diligence comes into play. It takes discipline, but it’s up to you to make sure that before you click on anything or enter your access data anywhere that you know who it’s from. The bad guys in this scenario pretend to be someone you know. This makes it harder to resist the immediate click, but it’s worth waiting a few minutes to confirm who sent it. So much for instant gratification… but you’ll be safer for it!

Peter L

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Does sharing passwords mean you’re in love?

Sunday, February 14th, 2010

Back in the 7th grade I had my first girlfriend. It was true puppy love: we were together constantly at school and we shared everything, including our locker combinations. Sharing locker combinations was the thing to do. Every once in a while you would hear about a breakup and that he or she had thrown her or his stuff out of the locker onto the hallway floor, and that was just about the worst that could happen. There wasn’t a risk that your personal stuff would be revealed and exploited by bad guys half way around the world.

Back then (I’ll just say that it was in the 1980’s :-) ), that was about the only ‘secret’ security information that a pre-teen had. ‘Online’ wasn’t even a word back then and bulletin board services were just starting up for the techie types.

Well, it’s not the 1980’s and you’re not in junior high, anymore. The Internet is a part of our lives and personal data security and identity theft are on everyone’s mind. Yet, I regularly meet adults who tell me that they share online passwords with their lover – they say it’s cute. I’ve actually had people tell me that sharing passwords is a stage in each relationship that has to take place! (We know that the third date can be pretty busy, so does password swapping come on the 4th date, or maybe the 5th!?!)

It’s not about trusting or not trusting, it’s about common sense. Go ahead and share all your emails with your loved one if you want, just don’t give him or her your passwords. Even if you’re ‘positive’ that he won’t reveal your password, by sharing your password with someone else, you’re increasing the risk that the information may get out by accident. It’s not worth the risk, keep your passwords private. Be safe with Sticky Password Manager.

Tell him you love him with a kiss, not with your passwords.

Tell her you love her with flowers and a diamond, not with your passwords.

Peter L

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Security you’ll use

Tuesday, February 2nd, 2010

The secret to just about all things in life: start with manageable or agreeable amounts and repeat.

What am I talking about?

New Year’s passed recently, so we still have resolutions ringing in our heads. How many friends do you have who loudly proclaimed on January 1, that they just joined a fancy new gym or bought expensive exercise equipment?!  (Or, maybe it was you who made the claim?) Are they still keeping up with the impressive exercise programs? Typically, most people fail in their exercise programs because they choose the wrong program. If Bob doesn’t like lifting heavy things on bars, or staring at a TV while sitting on a bike that doesn’t go anywhere, then he’s probably not going to be inspired to keep going to the gym to do it over and over, for weeks on end until he gets in shape – even though he bought a membership at that fancy gym. But if Sue signs up at the Y because she likes swimming, then she is more likely to keep up with a schedule. In the end, who’s likely to be more successful in attaining their health goals? Sue, not necessarily because of a super strenuous program, but because she found something that she could do in reasonable doses over and over.

So, great, you’ll go to the Y and start swimming, but what does any of this have to do with security?

Actually, a lot. The majority of people consider anything to do with security to be boring, or they don’t like it because it slows them down in what they want to do right NOW. These folks may have all sorts of imposing security hardware and software on their computers, but you’ll note that they often disregard proper usage. They simply ignore warnings from their firewalls by clicking ‘allow all’, that is, if they have their firewall turned on at all. And Microsoft security updates? Why should they bother? Strong passwords with some sort of solid approach to password management? Not likely! And all of these folks want to maintain their ‘health’ -  keep their identities safe online and their personal data secure.

The better approach is to have basic set of tools that you’ll use: an anti-virus program (many include anti-spyware), a firewall and a password manager – and perform those security updates from Microsoft. That’s the minimum. If you’ve read any of the earlier posts in this blog, or the general news, then you know that password and phishing exploits happen too frequently to ignore. A password manager is now part of the basic kit. Start with these few tools, and learn to use them. You’ll see that it doesn’t require any more effort to learn how to use them than it does to click on ‘allow all’ to break through your firewall!

Once you’ve built the foundation for your security health, add more tools in manageable amounts and repeat.

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