A digital officer for Travelers Bond & Financial Products has written a good advice piece for owners of small businesses, offering them five tips on how to protect their companies from computer hackers. (We can easily add a key sixth tip just to make the advice a little more comprensive.) The column by Tim Francis, [...]
Whether they mean to or not, most folks leave their digital fingerprints all over the Internet. By using online services to communicate, share, bank, pay bills, watch TV, or any of a million reasons to be online you’re creating a digital profile captured by Big Business. So what happens when Big Brother comes and asks [...]
Verizon has released its 2013 Data Breach Investigations Report. The report analyzes information from security incidents, data breaches, and security organization data from around the world. This year’s report outlines a number of findings that could help businesses and individuals understand and better prepare for the possibility of data threats. One of the most discussed [...]
Government has enacted privacy laws – generally known as “the right to be left alone” – for hundreds of years. As technology has changed, so too have the laws that govern privacy, albeit at usually a slower pace. U.S. Representative Ted Poe (R-Texas) has co-sponsored legislation, the Online Communications and Geolocation Protection Act, to augment [...]
So, the NSA is getting huge new digs in Utah. That would be the U.S. government’s National Security Agency, the super-secret spy agency that sends chills down the spine of every conspiracy theorist from Maine to Hawaii. (An aside: If the NSA is so secret, why do we know about this project?) Based on our [...]
With the constant beatings Google takes from governments, regulators and privacy advocates in the European Union, one would think the giant search-engine provider would have little time for cookies. But, in the great big World Wide Web, those little cookies — the digital kind — make the browsing experience so much better for people. And [...]
In the immediate aftermath of the deadly act of terrorism during the April 15 Boston Marathon, information technology, or IT, played a huge role in the critical care for the bombing victims as well as for the medical professionals who treated them. And in this emergency, involving almost 200 victims with varying degrees of blast, [...]
The natural curiosity and heart-tugs of everyday people are not lost on the nefarious types who would infect our computers with garbage, scrape the digital content for key personal and financial data and then try rob us blind. Those who make digital security a profession have been warning computer users to be careful when searching [...]
Anyone who’s ever filed a federal income tax return or had the unfortunate experience of a tax audit knows — and has to admit — that the U.S. Internal Revenue Agency is one of most effective arms of the government. Just the mere mention of the IRS is enough to invoke the “fear factor” and [...]
On the issue of people’s personal e-mail, the U.S. Internal Revenue Service is going nice on us. Or so says the agency’s top guy. Steven Miller, the acting IRS commissioner, appeared before a U.S. Senate committee hearing on April 16. He was forced to respond to tough questions about the agency’s controversial stance that tax [...]
