Author Archives: mike

Friday’s DDoS Attack And The Mirai IoT Worm

Posted on 2016-10-25 by mike

It may have reached your attention that there was a significant denial of service attack against a widely used DNS provider – the service provider for organisations such as Twitter, Github, and Amazon. The effect was to make certain services … Continue reading →

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Free Converters May Come With Unwanted Gifts

Posted on 2016-09-13 by mike

I read this morning a post on another blog site about an experiment that someone tried. They converted a PDF file to a DOC file using five different free web-based converters and found that three of the results were malware-infected. … Continue reading →

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Do Not Attach Network Equipment to the UoP Network

Posted on 2016-08-18 by mike

It can be very tempting for a quick solution (especially for a temporary bodge) to attach network equipment up the University network. Don’t do it. Please! In the past it was unusual for network equipment to be so widely available, … Continue reading →

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Do You Know Email’s “BCC” Header?

Posted on 2016-07-26 by mike

There are a number of stories going around at the moment relating to unintentional release of email addresses in terms of allowing third parties access to the email addresses. This is almost always a mistake made by someone who used conventional … Continue reading →

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TeamViewer: People Being Hacked

Posted on 2016-06-03 by mike

There are many reports that those using the TeamViewer application are being subjected to hacks with their bank accounts being emptied and similar problems. The details of how the attackers are breaking in are not available, but it seems likely that … Continue reading →

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Have You Changed Your Myspace Account Password Recently?

Posted on 2016-05-31 by mike

Don’t laugh. Some of us who have been around for more than a few years may well have used a myspace account at some point in the past. And you may well have set your account up with a password … Continue reading →

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Sending SurveyMonkey Questionnaires Without Being “Spammed”

Posted on 2016-05-25 by mike

We recently encountered an issue where somebody attempted to send a questionnaire constructed in SurveyMonkey to a number of students and some deliveries were made to the students’ spam folders. Which is obviously sub-optimal. Unfortunately we do not fully control … Continue reading →

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Be Careful What You Screenshot …

Posted on 2016-05-18 by mike

One of the latest stories from the security world is about a Christian pastor caught undertaking the kind of web browser activity you would not expect (or maybe you would) because he had taken a screenshot (presumably to capture the … Continue reading →

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Apache: Using X-Frame-Options To Evade Click-Jacking

Posted on 2016-03-15 by mike

Click-Jacking. It tells you all about it on the Wikipedia article. This posting is about how to avoid security scans telling you to disable click-jacking, if you are using the Apache web server software. If you’re using IIS, you are … Continue reading →

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Ransomware for OSX

Posted on 2016-03-07 by mike

It turns out that ransomware is no longer just for Windows; OSX has it too. If you use the OSX version of the Transmission Bittorrent client, you may want to check what version you are running because version 2.90 was … Continue reading →

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