If you are fond of renting personal computers from the nearby Intenet café, be sure that your private information like e-mail address, browser history, cookies and others are still safe. How can you keep your private information safe? Here are some steps if you are using Internet Explorer:

1. On Internet Explorer, click on Tools
2. Click Internet Properties.
3. Now select Delete cookies, Delete Files, Clear History.
4. After everything else you click OK.

You private information are now delete on the workstation you rented. If you are using Mozilla Firefox all you have to do is click Tools then click Clear Private Data.

Image source: www.digitalbattle.com

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Maybe you asked yourself a few times already, “What is the most secure internet browser? Firefox? IE? Safari? Opera?” and the list goes on of popular internet browsers. A lot of us spends a lot of your time surfing the internet, everyone of us should make sure that we use the most secure internet browser to make sure that our private information are safe. According to Symantec, the least secure browser is Mozilla Firefox, which got 122 reported vulnerabilities for the past year. This is quite alarming because I use Firefox a lot. On the other hand, Opera is the most secure internet browser which got 19 reported vulnerabilities last year.

via Softpedia
Image source: www.pegysus.com

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5. Swedish Urology Group — Urine Trouble!
Victims: “Hundreds”
Class Action Outrage Scale: 1 out of 10 lawyers

Doctors lost three hard drives containing patients’ personal information, and we mean personal!

4. The Nature Conservancy — Think of It as Recycled Data
Victims: 14,000
Class Action Outrage Scale: 9 out of 10 lawyers

Someone at the Conservancy was thinking locally but acting globally by apparently visiting a website of questionable provenance. The site was poisoned with malware. Soon, malicious hackers were clear-cutting names, home addresses, birthdates, Social Security numbers of employees and their dependents, and, yes, direct deposit bank account numbers. Let’s hope there’s been a climate change in the group’s security department.

3. TSA, Part II – Still Doing DHS Proud!
Victims: 100,000
Class Action Outrage Scale: 3 out of 10 lawyers

Thieves stole a computer hard drive with the names, Social Security numbers, dates of birth and bank account and routing information of current and former employees, including federal air marshals. Don’t worry, though. How easy could it be to pose as an air marshal with only that information?

2. Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs — One Regrets the Error
Victims: 25 million
Class Action Outrage Scale: 10 out of 10 lawyers

Two CDs containing personal data on about 7 million families went missing in the mail, and the HMRC chancellor resigned. Frankly, we included it just so we could quote sentences like: “The chancellor seeks the advice of the Serious Organised Crime Agency,” and “Mr Cable said he sincerely hoped the discs would not fall into the hands of ‘the criminal fraternity,’” and “Police have visited London rubbish tips in their hunt for missing computer discs.” Makes the worst breach in Britain’s history sound kind of lovely.

1. TJX — ’Sorry About That. Here’s a Gift Card. Come Back Soon for our Sale!’
Victims: Millions of bargain shoppers worldwide
Class Action Outrage Scale: 8 out of 10 lawyers

No breach got more ink this year than TJX’s, which involved some, OK, tens of millions, OK, 50 million, all right all right around 100 million credit and debit card records. Priceless moments included TJX’s defense in press accounts that “our security was comparable to many other major retailers” and the portion of TJX’s proposed settlement with consumers in which the company would hold a three-day “Customer Appreciation Sale” and give some customers $30 store vouchers. (Sorry about the e. coli in the meat in our store; here’s a gift card to buy more meat in our store). After consumer advocates raised a stink, the vouchers were changed to $15 checks. Sad as the whole episode was for consumers, TJX’s stock has remained healthy. Don’t you just love a bargain?

via [CSOOnline]

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If you have a MySpace or Facebook account, then you better be on the look out for apps or widgets that may have trojan viruses running in the background. According to researchers at Finjan, cyberattackers are now going to these social networking sites such to get more victims.

“Attacks will become more sophisticated by combining several services in order to heighten infection ratios and decrease the detection rate, while providing more robust and scalable attack frameworks,” Yuval Ben-Itzhak, chief technology officer, Finjan, said in a news release. “The focus will be on trojan technology as it enables maximum flexibility in terms of command and control. This adds another potentially malicious element to the ‘legitimate’ web traffic that needs to be examined by security solutions.”

In short, before installing the app or widget that your friend sent you, confirm if it came from them. If it didn’t, kindly delete it immediately. If it did come from them, research on the app or widget from previous users.
Source

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Denial of Service (DoS) is an attack designed to render a computer or network incapable of providing normal services. The most common DoS attacks will target the computer’s network bandwidth or connectivity. Bandwidth attacks flood the network with such a high volume of traffic, that all available network resources are consumed and legitimate user requests can not get through. Connectivity attacks flood a computer with such a high volume of connection requests, that all available operating system resources are consumed, and the computer can no longer process legitimate user requests. The high-profile attacks of the week of February 6th, 2000 were primarily bandwidth attacks, and all of the targets were high-profile internet web sites. A complete description of Denial of Service attacks is available from CERT on http://www.cert.org/tech_tips/denial_of_service.html.

Distributed Denial of Service attack
A Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack uses many computers to launch a coordinated DoS attack against one or more targets. Using client/server technology, the perpetrator is able to multiply the effectiveness of the Denial of Service significantly by harnessing the resources of multiple unwitting accomplice computers which serve as attack platforms. Typically a DDoS master program is installed on one computer using a stolen account. The master program, at a designated time, then communicates to any number of “agent” programs, installed on computers anywhere on the internet. The agents, when they receive the command, initiate the attack. Using client/server technology, the master program can initiate hundreds or even thousands of agent programs within seconds.

Source

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Here are some simple ways on how to could keep yourself same from threats and vulnerabilities on the Internet.

• Install anti-spyware and anti-virus on your personal computer
• Update your operating system and software (especially your anti-virus and anti-spyware) promptly for security patches and other important updates.
• Install Firewall too. Most operating systems have built-in firewall all you have to do is to enable them.
• Avoid visiting malicious websites.
• Avoid downloading files that are malicious (especially .exe files).
• Do a regular maintenance of your personal computers (Update, Defrag, Virus scan and other things that can improve the security and stability of your system).

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“Mendacious machines controlled by hackers that reroute Internet traffic from infected computers to fraudulent Web sites are increasingly being used to launch attacks, according to a paper published this week by researchers with the Georgia Institute of Technology and Google Inc.

The paper estimates roughly 68,000 servers on the Internet are returning malicious Domain Name System results, which means people with compromised computers are sometimes being directed to the wrong Web sites — and often have no idea.

The peer-reviewed paper, which offers one of the broadest measurements yet of the number of rogue DNS servers, was presented at the Internet Society’s Network and Distributed System Security Symposium in San Diego.

The fraud works like this: When a user with an affected computer tries to go to, for example, Google’s Web site, they are redirected to a spoof site loaded with malicious code or to a wall of ads whose profits flow back to the hackers.

The hackers who hijack DNS queries are looking to steal personal information, from e-mail login credentials to credit data, and take over infected machines.

The spoof sites run the gamut. Some are stunningly convincing, others amusingly bogus with spelling errors and typos.”

Source

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The FBI called for new legislation that allows the federal police to keep close look at internet activity to track down illegal activities. This seem to go beyond a current plan to monitor traffic on federal-government networks, and that the bureau should have a broad “omnibus” authority to conduct monitoring and surveillance of private-sector networks as well. This could violate the Fourth Amendment’s guarantee of freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures. In general, courts have ruled that police need search warrants to obtain the content of communication

Source

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Suspecting a spyware in your system? Here are some tips on how you could get rid of spyware in your computer:

1. Get, install and periodically run Ad-aware and Spybot Search & Destroy.
2. To prevent reinfection by Aureate/Radiate – search for advert.dll on your system. If it’s there and if you can, delete it (Ad-aware will do this for you). Then create an empty text file, name it advert.dll, make it read-only and save it in your Windows/System directory. Then configure Ad-aware (version 5 or later) to ignore advert.dll.

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The software giant announced that it will be releasing their own Windows embedded anti-virus that raises some eyebrows in the IT industry. Why, well the company has been known to be the most attacked PC platform on earth compared to other operating systems due to their ways of old. This hatred of the company stems back from the days when Microsoft was involved in what can be called “steal then deal”, when they were involved in getting nifty software form the many start up firms who produced respectable programs they embedded within their OS releases. This is sure to result in lawsuits which the company then opted to settle out of court, buying out the rights and even the company in a hostile take-over. Please tell me more! »

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