Articles

Russia may briefly disconnect from the Internet as a cyber-defense exercise. It's being billed as an attempt to see if the country could keep the benefits of the Internet without having to interact with the rest of the world, though critics suggest ... it is nothing more than political censorship. Russian officials are said to fear that other countries may be taking measures to block its country from the Internet. On paper there does not appear to be any such proposals, though NATO (the North Atlantic Treaty Organization) has threatened some form of sanctions over alleged cyber attacks by Russia ... (view more)

Infopackets Reader Sam J. writes: " Dear Dennis, I have an older TPLink TL-WDR3500 router and I would like to attach a USB or external hard drive to it using the ' Storage Sharing ' option so that I can share files through my network. This would be ... ideal for me so I can share my Roboform passwords across devices. The issue is that the Storage Sharing option will only work if I enable CIFS 1.0 protocol in Windows because that is what the router uses to make the attached storage appear as a network drive letter in File Explorer. It is my understanding that CIFS 1.0 has a massive security issue ... (view more)

Google has launched a new tool to make it easier to know if a password has been hacked. But the way it works has raised some questions. The tool is called "Password Checkup" and is an extension for the Chrome web browser. It's designed to deal with ... details that are known to be part of a security breach, rather than offering more general advice such as using long passwords. If a user installs Password Checkup, Google will run a check whenever they log in to any site (not just ones Google operates). If it matches any entries on a database of known breaches, Chrome will display a ... (view more)

Infopackets Reader Jake J. writes: " Dear Dennis, I recently upgraded my PC to Windows 10 with the October 2018 update (version 1809, build 17763). Everything seems to be working fine, however the other day I needed remote support help from a friend ... of mine using TeamViewer. To get connected to my machine, he instructed that I go to the TeamViewer website and download the TeamViewer program, then run it. He then requested my ID and Password in order to connect to my machine, but I could not find where to obtain this information despite him sending me step-by-step instructions with screenshots ... (view more)

The number of robocalls to Americans rose by nearly 50 percent last year, according to a newly-published estimate. It's consistent with other reports that suggest that 2019 will be the first year where half of all phone calls are marketing messages. ... The figure comes from Hiya, a "spam-monitoring service" and is based on data from 450,000 users of its phone app. There's reason for a note of caution on the raw numbers, as it's possible the type of people who would use such an app are getting more unwanted calls than the average citizen in the first place. That aside, Hiya says that if the ... (view more)

An extremely creative form of malware on Android devices uses motion sensors to help stay undetected. It's designed to combat one of the key methods used by malware scanning tools. Trend Micro says it found the malware hidden in two Google Play ... Store apps named "BatterySaverMobi" and "Currency Converter," which claimed to provide functions as their names suggest. (Source: arstechnica.com ) Once installed, the apps downloaded malware in the background, then used a fake system update message to trick the user into giving permission to install it. The malware, named " ... (view more)

Google's use of data to personalize advertisements could cost it more than $50 million. It's been fined for breaching European rules on data protection. The fine comes under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), a set of rules drawn up by ... the European Union and covering activity in 27 countries. It follows a complaint filed by privacy groups the day the rules came into force last May. The breach is all to do with Google's obligation to get user consent before using personal data to provide targeted ads - one of the key aspects of the company's business. Although Google does allow ... (view more)