Terry Whearley, CMIT Solutions of Fairfax, is scheduled to appear tomorrow morning - July 23rd - around 9-9:30 am on NewsChannel 8, Good Morning Washington. If you get NewsChannel 8 (www.wjla.com/tv/nc8/channels/), join us for some security tips for protecting your personal and company data on your mobile devices.
Computers, laptops, tablets, smartphones, printers, servers… We can’t live without them, right? But they sure are notorious for causing major headaches.
Perhaps you heard about the 37-year-old Colorado Springs man who took his malfunctioning desktop out back last April and shot it eight times with a handgun, telling the Los Angeles Times that it felt “glorious” to vent his frustrations.
In a recent Dell Power More article, results of an online survey revealed that half of all passwords were more than five years old. The report, which was commissioned by TeleSign and conducted by Lawless Research, also found that 77% of consumers hadn’t changed their passwords in a year or more, 21% still used passwords more than 10 years old, and 73% use duplicate passwords for multiple accounts.
Before we fire up the grill and light off the fireworks this weekend, let’s remember that the 4th of July is all about celebrating the resolve of our founding fathers, who declared independence from Britain 239 years ago and set the United States on an unprecedented path to greatness.
After a relatively quiet few months in the data breach world, June featured a surge in news surrounding the compromise of personal information. Relatively small breaches were reported in Texas, New Jersey, and a host of other states. But the biggest announcement came from the United States federal government, which revealed that cyberattackers had hacked into the Office of Personnel Management in December 2014, gaining access to unencrypted data on more than four million federal workers.
Cyberattackers are adept at finding new ways to ply their nefarious trade — some of the more elaborate scams we’ve detailed over the years include fraudulent Microsoft support calls, health care enrollment phishing attempts, and business email compromise.
Back in January, we wrote about Windows Server 2003, which Microsoft will end support for in July 14th. Remember the build-up last year for the death of Windows XP? A similar scenario will play out in 2015, as Microsoft announced in November that July 14th would mark the end of life for Windows Server 2003 and Server 2003 R2.
The most immediate impact of this announcement is that any system using Windows Server 2003 will no longer receive updates or patches from Microsoft, which the computing giant said in a white paper “can result in a less stable and less secure infrastructure for your organization.
Hurricane season officially started on Monday, June 1st. And although the NOAA estimates that this year will be a slow one for tropical formation in the Atlantic Ocean, the occasion still highlights the importance of disaster preparedness — especially in light of the devastating thunderstorms, tornados, and floods that struck a broad swath of the country in April and May.
Microsoft is not shy about nudging its business customers into the future. Whether it was the all-out blitz of last year’s death of Windows XP campaign, or this year’s ongoing effort to ease enterprises away from Windows Server 2003, the message comes across loud and clear: when Microsoft stops supporting a product, you really don’t want to be left using it.
Microsoft is not shy about nudging its business customers into the future. Whether it was the all-out blitz of last year’s death of Windows XP campaign, or this year’s ongoing effort to ease enterprises away from Windows Server 2003, the message comes across loud and clear: when Microsoft stops supporting a product, you really don’t want to be left using it.
