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techculture101.com talk tech, social, life, events, and whatever..

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Saturday funnies! ...still laughing

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#orlandounitedday

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3A3ed5BmYjQ&sns=em

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OMG! It's the sky!!!! Wait, what's that bright light in the sky? IT'S THE SUN!!!!! Wooohooo! via Facebook http://ift.tt/2sXFjaY

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Patreon is awesome!

This is a great way to support you favorite artists. You can set your contributions at any level you want. Belle Lehr is one of my all time favorites and I contribute to every piece of art she posts. It's awesome being a Patreon and get to see new art first!  

https://www.patreon.com/Belle/posts 

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#brefuss (at Fresh First)

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I need to go for a ride! Where's my blue sky? (at The River Reach Island)

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F this weather! (at Fort Lauderdale, Florida)

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Cheers to all you Super Moms out there!

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So far in this series we've talked about how to protect yourself from getting (or spreading) ransomware and other malware through the various threat vectors. Now we are going to take a look at what to do if ransomware gets through your multiple layers of security and actually infects your network. First, let's talk about what you don't want to do, which is pay the ransom. Several things may happen when you capitulate to the criminals: They might not release your data. There's no guarantee that you will be able to decrypt your data just because you've paid the ransom.

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Every few years or so, a new threat surfaces and becomes the attackers’ “go-to” method of attack. Just a short while ago, advanced persistent threats (APTs) topped every headline – and organizations raced to stop these attacks where attackers would hide and move laterally across the network once they’d gained access. Next to phishing, ransomware is undeniably the most successful and profitable style of attack for cybercriminals. It's estimated that last year alone, ransomware scams cost victims nearly $1 billion worldwide. And it’s no wonder it’s become so successful – it is based on the old-fashioned criminal model used by

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Maybe it’s happened to someone you know, or maybe it’s already happened to you. You sit down to work, only to find that you can’t access your important files. Worse yet, a message appears on the screen to tell you that your data has been encrypted, and that you’ll only get the decryption key if you pay a significant ransom. At this point, most people don’t know what to do. Business screeches to a halt while you search for advice, help, a way out. But the truth is, if you haven’t taken steps in advance to prepare for a ransomware

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Time to Finally Eliminate Magnetic Stripes on Credit Cards Once and For All

There’s generally not much love being lost between credit card companies and providers of retail services that rely heavily on credit card transactions. The credit card companies recently began embedding chips in their cards that forced every retailer to upgrade their point-of-sale (PoS) systems at great expense. The theory is that credit cards embedded with chips will result in better security because the data on the card is encrypted. However, regardless of whether a credit card has a chip every card still has a magnetic stripe on the back of the card. This was intended to make it simpler for

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IRS and tax-related email scams are wreaking havoc once again

The closer we get to tax day in the United States, the more likely we are to see criminals take advantage of the activity around tax-related documents. We've covered these scams before, here and here, and we predicted tax-related trouble in this blog here. Just as expected, there's a new IRS related scam making the rounds. It works like this: Emails with a malicious Word document arrive in the potential victim's inbox. There are several variants with subject lines such as, Click here to download a pdf document with over 800 sample subject lines for IRS related spam. 'You are

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Kirk Ransomware does things differently

A new strain of ransomware named Kirk has been observed and analyzed by researchers. Kirk Ransomware targets 625 file types for encryption, and like most ransomware, it then demands payment from the victim to decrypt those files. But despite the similarities, Kirk isn't your standard ransomware. As of this writing, it remains unclear how Kirk is being distributed. It is known that Kirk disguises itself as the Low Orbital Ion Cannon, which is an open source network stress tool (or DDoS attack tool, depending on your intentions). Kirk Ransomware executable is named 'loic_win32.exe,' and when executed, it will generate an