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Category Archives: Security

Computer and network security

We are all first responders, in a way

17-Dec-12

I couldn’t find the words to respond in writing to the deeply sad news from Newtown, Conn., right away, so was grateful for two thoughtful responses on Friday and Saturday – one from my friend, educator Jackie Gerstein, in Facebook and another in the form of an editorial in the Christian Science Monitor building on [...]

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State of cybersecurity concerns: Study

02-Oct-12

It’s National Cyber Security Awareness Month in the US, and a group of companies, government entities, and nonprofit organizations kicked it off with some research. The survey from McAfee and the nonprofit National Cyber Security Alliance found that 90% of people surveyed responded “not completely” when asked how safe they feel from “viruses, malware and [...]

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Google’s data-security ed campaign & site

18-Jan-12

This week Google launched an ad campaign and Web site headlined “Good To Know,” according to a report at the Washington Post. Aimed at teaching Net users the basics of protecting their data in our increasingly social media environment, the campaign has ads appearing in “dozens of U.S. newspapers, including The New York Times, USA [...]

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Key phishing-avoidance trick

08-Sep-11

Share this easy phishing-avoidance tactic with Facebook users in your family. ZDNET writer Ed Bott provides screenshots of four Facebook email notifications he has received, two of them definitely not from Facebook. He illustrates how hard it is to tell fake Facebook emails from real ones, but here’s a great trick that will help you [...]

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DefCon’s first kid hackers

09-Aug-11

You know that there are hackers, and then there are hackers, right? Sure there are criminal hackers, but there are also plenty of “white hat” hackers who are in it for the challenge and to help find security breaches so companies and governments can get them fixed. Well, DefCon, one of the longest-running annual hacker [...]

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How cellphones get hacked

21-Jul-11

Amid the headlines and hearings about a British tabloid hacking cellphones, you may be curious about how that was done. You may also be curious about phone security for kids – I’ll get to that in a moment. My ConnectSafely co-director Larry Magid explained in the Huffington Post how easily those hacks can happen. He [...]

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Attacks on Macs

07-Jun-11

There have been “a number of reports over the past few weeks about an anti-virus scam that goes by a number of aliases, including MacDefender, MacProtector and MacSecurity,” reports Larry Magid, my ConnectSafely.org co-director, at the San Jose Mercury News. He says he’s been religious about protecting his Windows computers against malware but only just [...]

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Phishing seriously on the rise in social sites

19-May-11

You know what phishing is, right? Tricking Net users into clicking on bad links and sharing sensitive info like passwords and credit card numbers by pretending to be someone the users trust (a friend, their bank, etc.). Well, Microsoft says the number of phishing attacks in social network sites increased 1,200% last year, eWeekEurope.co.uk reports. [...]

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Helping Japan with our brains as well as hearts

15-Mar-11

While we model and teach care for others in the disaster relief effort for Japan, we can also teach our children intelligent, or media-literate, giving – the kind that actually contributes, avoiding criminal exploitation of their generosity.

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E-shopping security for gift-givers of all ages

14-Dec-10

This is a great time to protect pocketbooks and computers and teach new media literacy all at once.

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