Category: Security

June 20, 2011

Security Alert: 62000 emails and passwords leaked!

This is an urgent security message.

Security Breach by a hacker group

Recently a hacker group called Lulz Security released a list of 62,000 emails and passwords on their website. While they have not disclosed where they obtained the information from or which sites is this information for, nonetheless the security implications are massive! Most of us only ever use one or two passwords for all our services. If this is the case with you and your email address is on the list then you are potentially open to identity theft at this very instance!

We urge you to please check the list by clicking here . To quickly check if your email address exists in the list or not you can use your browser’s search functionality (usually activated by pressing Ctrl and F keys together).

Protecting Yourself

We advise all our readers and clients to keep changing their passwords regularly. Further we always advise to keep complex passwords. Creating complex passwords is not as tough as it may appear at first. To give you an example consider the ordinary phrase – kitchentowel

Following a series of simple transformations you can convert this phrase into a complex password

1. Follow the rules of English language and type the word as – KitchenTowel

2. Now replace “o” by number zero everywhere in the word. This now becomes – KitchenT0wel

3. Be excited about it. End the phrase with an ! as – KitchenT0wel!

4. For added security select your favorite letter in the phrase (your first initial, your loved one’s first initial etc.) and capitalize it. Say you decide on “i”. The phrase finally becomes – KItchenT0wel!

Thats it! Done!

We have taken a small phrase kitchentowel and turned it into a very formidable password containing a mixture of uppercase and lowercase letter, numbers and special characters. You can devise as many rules as you like and complicate the passwords further. Alternatively to begin with you might want to only follow steps 1 and 3 and keep your password relatively simple. The choice is yours!

If you would need any help from us on any topic discussed in this post please leave us a message here or email us at fixit@BritishPcRepairs.co.uk

March 3, 2011

Thousands of home laptops and computers infected by hackers

by admin — Categories: Security — Tags: 2 Comments

Computer Virus and their removal

In an astonishing display of their reach and potential a group of hackers have managed to infect thousands of computers and laptops that visited certain popular websites like Autotrader, Vue and London Stock Exchange.

The scam started when on Sunday a group of cyber criminals hacked into the servers of an advertising firm. The group was then able to serve malicious adverts on these websites.  These malicious adverts were able to infect a visiting user’s laptop or computer and subsequently asked for payments to remove the supposed “infection”.

To find out some of the common signs of virus and malware infections you might want to read our “guide of symptoms” at www.BritishPcrRpairs.co.uk/VirusRemoval.aspx

If you visited any of these sites recently we advise you to get in touch with our security experts as soon as possible by calling us on 01372-890-123 or emailing us at fixit@BritishPcRepairs.co.uk. Alternatively you can use our main website page at www.BritishPcRepairs.co.uk/ContactUs.aspx to get in touch with us.

August 3, 2010

Criticial – Microsoft Issues Emergency patch for Critical Windows Flaw

by admin — Categories: Microsoft, Security, Windows — Tags: , , 2 Comments

 

 

 

Microsoft issued an out of schedule patch last night which patches a critical vulnerability in all versions of Windows. The company did not identify which exact flaw is being patched but the description of the flaw is a close match to the LNK flaw which attackers have been exploiting for several weeks.

Please make sure you run Windows Update on your laptops and PCs and download this critical update. Without this update installed your laptop is open for remote control by attackers. Contrary to popular myth if your laptop or PC has been compromised by an attacker, there will be NO apparent visible change in your laptop or PC. When compromised your Laptop or PC will most likely be exploited by the attacker as a part of a “bot net” when you are not using it.

If you would like any further advise or help on how to keep your system updated using Windows Update please write to us at fixit@BritishPcRepairs.co.uk

 

 

December 20, 2009

Twitter Hijacked – time to change passwords?

by admin — Categories: Security — Tags: Leave a comment

On December 17th Twitter was hijacked by “Iranian Cyber Army” who managed to compromise DNS server records which in layman’s term means that they were able to redirect requests to twitter.com to their own servers. Users who tried to login during that time saw the screenshot which is presented in this post above.

While this does not necessarily mean that any passwords were compromised, it would have been very easy for the attackers to set up a fake login page and harvest user passwords as the unsuspecting users tried to log in. We would however suggest that if you haven’t already done so yet, please change your twitter.com password to be on the safer side.

November 5, 2009

Facebook and MySpace exploited!

by admin — Categories: Security — Tags: 16 Comments

 

 

According to some recent researches done by a developer in Netherlands the popular social networking sites Facebook and MySpace both suffered from an inherent flaw which allowed an attacker to steal their user’s private data. While Facebook and MySpace have denied the severity of the error (obviously!) the software world is in agreement that it was a serious weakness in the websites which should have been found and fixed long ago.


Here are some of the common things you can do to ensure your private data stays “private”!


1. Avoid clicking links from within Facebook or MySpace that eventually takes you out of the websites unless you can verify that the target website is a reputed safe one.

2. It is a very good practice to change your passwords regularly.

3. Avoid checking the “Remember Me” box on the login pages of these sites. It is better to let your browser remember the password so that as soon as you type in your username the password gets entered automatically by the browser. Most modern browsers offer this functionality. We can not stress enough how safer this approach is compated to ticking the “Remember Me” box!


For more technical kinds here is the complete story – http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9140388/Developer_finds_major_coding_errors_in_Facebook_MySpace

Please do share your thoughts or comments or suggestions!

 

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