Back to School: Keeping Your IT Skills Sharp
August 21st, 2012
It’s back to school time for the kids—and it’s the perfect time to consider sharpening your IT skills. You’ll find continuing education opportunities abound at colleges and universities, but if you are like most Information Technology professionals you don’t have time to make that level of commitment. So what’s a hungry IT security pro to [...]
By: Chris Merritt - Dir. Solutions Marketing
Change Your LinkedIn Password – Now!
June 6th, 2012
LinkedIn – the online professional networking site which I suspect many Optimal Security blog readers use – has apparently been hacked, resulting in something like 6.5M SHA-1 hashed passwords being posted in a Russian hacker site. This evolving situation will certainly be updated through-out the day (and beyond), so I don’t want to recap the [...]
Safe Social Media in 3 Steps
May 21st, 2012
Social media introduces risk – no doubt about it. As security pros, our first inclination is to of course ban it’s use on our networks altogether because it’s the safest approach. But, it’s also the wrong one. Like it or not, social media has forever changed the way we do business, for the better. According [...]
Social App Security – An Oxymoron?
October 18th, 2010
The recent Wall Street Journal investigation on the Facebook privacy breach begs a fundamental question: Can a “social application” be secure? This is a question bigger than just Facebook. Popular mobile communications platforms such as Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android have also struggled with this as of late. Here is the core conundrum – platform [...]
How To Reduce Your Web 2.0 Risk
March 25th, 2010
95 percent of companies use Twitter and Facebook. Learn about the latest risks these web 2.0 applications bring into your organization and how to manage them.
5 Steps to Bridge Social Media and Security
February 3rd, 2010
As businesses move at a rapid pace to integrate social media as part of their overall corporate strategy to engage, build brand awareness and drive thought leadership, unfortunately, security has taken a back seat leaving businesses wide open to these Web 2.0 threats. The use of Web 2.0 has opened new risk channels for the [...]
My Password Is My Password
January 28th, 2010
Education is still key to IT security. Just look at users’ passwords. The New York Times reported last week on a study that exposed the overwhelming simplicity of users’ password choices. According to the study, which was conducted by Imperva, 20 percent of Web users choose a very simplistic password that can be easily guessed [...]
Key Steps to Navigate Around New Facebook Privacy Settings
January 4th, 2010
What’s all the fuss about the latest changes on Facebook? Simply put, the changes mean that nearly everything that you place on your Facebook page can now potentially be made available to anyone surfing the Internet. The latest Facebook changes are purported to be an enhancement to make the social networking site easier for people who are looking [...]
Who Owns Your Data in a Social World?
October 27th, 2009
Over the past months it has been interesting to watch the furor over certain End-User License Agreements and the definition of data ownership. Most draconian was the idea that once posted by a user, the data transferred ownership to the social networking site. This of course has huge implications to an individual user, especially for [...]
Another Phishing Scam Plagues Twitter Users
October 16th, 2009
With Twitter expected to top 18 million users by the end of this year, users of the widely utilized social media tool are seeing first-hand the ugly side of this popular platform. Another Twitter phishing scam reared its ugly head this week, aggressively sending out direct message spam, hoping to lure unsuspecting users to click [...]
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