Your daily dose of practical, easy to follow tech tips!
As you’ve probably heard by now, credit reporting giant Equifax has been hacked in what is being described as the largest security breach in history.
According to the company, the breach may have affected up to 143 million Americans. That’s almost half of the entire U.S. population.
And when you consider that millions of our fellow citizens are children who aren’t even in Equifax’s system, you can see that the odds are quite high that you and I are among those affected. [Read more…]
By now you’ve surely seen the heartbreaking images and videos coming out of the Houston, Texas area. Hurricane Harvey has almost completely devastated that area, and it isn’t finished yet.
Sadly, dozens of our fellow citizens and an untold number of pets are already known to have lost their lives in the flood, and those numbers are only expected to grow as the waters eventually recede.
What’s more, the scope and scale of the property damage is absolutely staggering. Hundreds of thousands of people have had to flee their homes and many of them will never be able to return. [Read more…]
As you probably know by now, scams and viruses are constantly making the rounds on Facebook.
The latest threat is spreading like wildfire with the help of the ubiquitous Facebook Messenger app that runs on millions of smart phones and tablets.
Commonly known as “Locky Ransomeware”, this threat is especially bad because there’s no known decryption program available for unlocking a device once it has been encrypted. [Read more…]
Copyfish is a very popular Optical Character Recognition (OCR) browser extension that extracts text from images and videos so you can insert it into a regular text file.
OCR technology has been around for decades, but Copyfish and other extensions now make it easy to extract text right from within your web browser.
Unfortunately, one of the employees at A9T9 (the company behind the Copyfish extension) fell for a phishing attempt and effectively handed control of the Copyfish Chrome extension to a hacker. [Read more…]
If you’ve been keeping up with the news today you know that a new strain of ransomware is spreading across the globe as we speak.
Individuals and companies in virtually every country have already been crippled by the attack, and even some utilities have been shut down.
So far several countries in Europe have suffered the brunt of the attack, but the wave is spreading fast and headed for other parts of the world, including the United States. [Read more…]