As we cope with the efforts to combat the infectiousness of COVID-19, we have turned increasingly to electronic means of communicating. SMS text messages, Facebook messaging, tweeting, livestreaming and video conferencing have all played a role in helping people stay connected when they need to stay at home. These technologies have been key to keeping people informed to a degree that was impossible 100 years ago when the flu epidemic ravaged the world. But as helpful as these communications tools are, they have their own risks. One tool that we have heard a lot about recently is Zoom, which describes... [...]

Many WordPress sites fall to hackers everyday. Yours could be next unless you protect it. There are two ways people try: 1. Frequent backups that you can use to restore your site if it is ever attacked. This can work, but it’s expensive and time-consuming. 2. Software that closes the gaps in native security for WordPress so that no hacker can get through. Joshua Zamora and Radu Hahaianu have just released software that will lock down your site and will also create and restore backups, in case a future version of WordPress ever opens loop-holes that bypass cureent lock-down methods. They... [...]

There’s buzz about Heartbleed all around the web. It has the potential to damage the reputations and the bank accounts of millions of people. This is the biggest scare since the Java vulnerability that was announced a couple of yers ago. The issue is that OpenSSL, software used by thousands of commerce sites, has a bug, and a crook found out about it. With that knowledge, Heartbleed was created to steal userids, passwords, name and other personal information from sites running OpenSSL. This week, in Canada, a 19-Year-Old Canadian Arrested for hacking into government computers using the... [...]