Do the Payment Card Industry Data Standards Reduce Cybercrime?

On March 31st the House of Representatives Subcomittee on Emerging Threats, Cybersecurity, and Science and Technology held a hearing on the effectiveness of the PCI Data Security Standards.  Video and documents from the hearing are available here. The question of the day was whether or not PCI DSS actually prevented computer crime.
I started watching it [...]

Tags: congress pci hearing, pci standards, security standards

What was that email password again?

Last week I was migrating a client to a new computer and was preparing to configure Outlook. Their email account used POP3 and they didn’t remember their password anymore. I really didn’t want to call the email provider to reset the password, but I had to get this setup too. With a [...]

Tags: email password recovery, pop3 emulator, pop3 password

Malicious Software Spreading Through Social Networking Sites

There is an active attack occuring on a number of popular social networking sites, such as Facebook, MySpace, Friendster and others.  Victims receive an invitation to view a video with a link attached to it.  When they click on the link, a message is displayed which states that they need an update for Adobe Flash [...]

Tags: computer attacks, malicous software, security warning, worm

Seven Steps to Improve Your Computer Security

Most of my clients and the people I meet with are in some way concerned about the security of their computers.  The problem that they have is that they aren’t sure what they should do.  Lets face it, not many people out there love figuring out what the bad guys are doing and how to [...]

Tags: computer security, network security, protect your computer

URL Encoder and Decoder

I frequently have to do a quick bit of URL encoding and decoding as part of my daily routine. I’ve been using a particular site for most of this, but I’ve never really become comfortable with putting some of these things into someone else’s web site. So I used the code as found [...]