So, you've built your company's website. That's great news and a major milestone, for sure.  Unfortunately, your work is just beginning.  If you want anybody to be able to find you among the billions of sites that make up the internet, you're going to need a little bit of help. The first and best thing you can do for your new site is to optimize it for SEO. SEO is shorthand for "Search Engine Optimization." A long time ago, search engines weren't all that smart. Back then, site owners could get away with things like "keyword stuffing," which is to use the same key word or phrase up t ..read more

Based on a recent survey conducted by the folks at Titaniam, a solid majority of organizations have robust security tools in place. Yet nearly 40 percent of them have fallen victim to a ransomware attack in the past year. How can this be?  With conventional tools in place, how can this still be happening? The answer to that question is complex. Ransomware attacks ultimately have three different phases.  Each phase must be protected against and in each case, the type of protection needed varies.  Let's start by taking a closer look at the anatomy of a typical ransomware attack. T ..read more

In June, Wiz engineers discovered and reported #AttachMe, a critical cloud isolation flaw in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). Due to its potential to affect all OCI customers, the #AttachMe cloud vulnerability is one of the most severe vulnerabilities discovered to date. The majority of the time, cloud isolation flaws only impact a single cloud service. However, in this case, the impact is related to an integral part of the cloud service. Engineers discovered that no special permissions were necessary to attach a disk to a virtual machine under a different user account. This suggests that a ..read more

Recently, Google's engineers introduced a small but important feature to their Calendar app.  If you haven't used the "known senders" option, you owe it to yourself to check it out. It allows you to toggle a setting that will filter out invites from people you don't know, with an eye toward eliminating or drastically reducing instances of invites from people you don't know automatically appearing in your calendar. It's a surprisingly good addition because prior to its inclusion, you had to jump through an annoying number of hoops to filter out unknown senders. This was done in a process w ..read more

DuckDuckGo has a reputation for protecting the privacy of its users far more than most other companies.  Last year, the tiny search engine announced that they were experimenting with a free service designed to dodge email trackers as a means of further protecting the privacy of its users. The company's Email Protection service works by stripping email trackers from messages. Initially, DuckDuckGo's Email Protection service was available via a waitlist only.  You had to sign up.  If/when a spot opened for you, you could test it out.  During this waitlist testing period, the ..read more

On September 7, 2022, Apple hosted its annual product release event at one pm Eastern Time (ET). Tim Cook, Apple's CEO, took the stage at the Far Out event held at the company's headquarters in Cupertino, California, to unveil a slew of brand-new and significantly enhanced devices. The iPhone 14 and several new smartwatches and AirPods are among the latest products. The company released three new smartwatches to add to its expanding collection. The new Apple watch series 8 was released at the event. Apple's newest smartwatch has a redesigned watch face, a large display, and several safety feat ..read more

Microsoft Teams is a part of the 365 product family and is used by more than 270 million people for exchanging text messages, videoconferencing, and file storage. In August of 2022, the team at Vectra Protect discovered a post-exploitation vulnerability in the plaintext storage disk used by Microsoft Teams while conducting research for a client. This vulnerability gives malicious actors, with either the local or remote systems access, the ability to obtain valid user credentials. Vectra discovered that the unencrypted credential management weakness affected all commercial and GCC Desktop Teams ..read more

Lenovo issued a security notice informing customers of multiple serious BIOS vulnerabilities affecting hundreds of Lenovo devices across various models (Desktop, All in One, IdeaCentre, Legion, ThinkCentre, ThinkPad, ThinkAgile, ThinkStation, ThinkSystem). Exploiting the vulnerabilities might result in the disclosure of sensitive information, an increase in privileges, a denial of service, and possibly even the execution of arbitrary code in some situations. The following are the six flaws detailed in Lenovo's security advisory: CVE-2021-28216: Fixed pointer flaw in TianoCore EDK II BIOS (ref ..read more

An unknown hacker, who claims to be eighteen years old, acquired administrative access to Uber's corporate network and proprietary internal tools on Thursday, September 15, 2022. On September 15, 2022, at 6:25 pm PT, Uber issued a statement on Twitter that it was "responding to a cybersecurity incident." An attacker gained access to the account of an Uber EXT contractor. A malware-infected personal device compromised the contractor's credentials. The contractor accepted the multi-factor authentication through a socially engineered attack, enabling the hacker access to the contractor's account ..read more

Tech giant Google recently announced that it's closing the doors on its IoT Core service.  Their stated reason for doing so was that their strategic partners can better manage customers' IoT services and devices. Time will tell if the company's decision was a good one. Another tech giant, Microsoft, is wasting no time and is moving heavily in the opposite direction, adding to their suite of IoT services and offering increasingly tight integration with Azure. In recent years, Microsoft has bet big on IoT, and now has an impressive stable of offerings. Microsoft's offerings include but are ..read more