How To Prevent ARP Spoofing

“You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time,

but you can not fool all of the people all of the time.”

-Abraham Lincoln

What is ARP spoofing, and why do I care? If you’re old enough, […]

How To Protect Your Quicken Data from All Your Programs

By now, I hope you’re aware that all of your programs can access your Quicken data. If you don’t care if your data is lost, destroyed, stolen, or published on the Internet, then you don’t have anything to worry about. For the rest of us, it’s an issue that needs to be addressed immediately. Here’s […]

How to Protect Yourself from Hacking Attacks

Hacking attacks happen all the time and pose a real security threat. Here are ten things you can do to protect yourself:

1) Don’t use the same password for all of your user accounts. Choose a variety of passwords, and make each one strong (no full words, use both numbers and letters). Keep your list […]

How to Implement Security Sandboxes

You may not know it, but ALL your programs can access your Quicken data. Not good. So, what can you do?

One solution to this nasty problem is to run all programs in a security sandbox. Unfortunately, the sandboxes in Windows 8 and Mac OS X Mountain Lion (10.8) are voluntary. Programmers can choose to […]

How to Use Facebook Securely

There’s a lot of routine activity on Facebook that I bet people would think twice about if they considered it from a security perspective:

How many times have you seen posts like, “I’m out at Starbucks getting my morning coffee and reading the paper…” Great! All a burglar (or the NSA) needs to know is […]

How to Strengthen Your Passwords

Don’t use the same password for everything. If a hacker penetrates one website, and discovers your password, they could try the same password on another site (like your bank’s website). If it works, the hacker could get rich quick and you would be out of luck.

So, how should you deal with passwords? Download KeePass. […]

How to Make Your Browser More Secure

Indulge me in a little test. Create a text file on your PC. Copy and paste this into it:

<html>

<body>

<br>My secret plans to become the next billionaire.

<br>My secret recipe for killer scones to sell to Starbucks.

<br>My password to all my websites.

[…]

How to Opt Out of Junk Mail

Data Marketers have lots of data about you. Acxiom’s latest ploy is for them to show you what data they already have on you. I checked at https://aboutthedata.com/portal. It really wasn’t that interesting, and much of it was wrong. The Acxiom website allows you to correct the information that is wrong. You can do that, […]

How to Download Software Safely

There is no such thing as free. “Free” software, music, video, and toolbar downloads are some of the the most common culprits for malware infection.

If you want to run software on your computer, you have to trust the software vendor not to do anything stupid, malicious, or sneaky on your computer. Most software […]

How to Install an Internet Security Suite

You probably need an Internet Security Suite. Both Windows and Mac users need it. I don’t know of a good Internet Security Suites for Linux. But, if you’re running Linux, you are probably already fairly computer savvy. An Internet Security Suite usually has a number of components to protect you against different dangers from hackers:

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