Putting technology expertise to work for your business. More by Tony Bradley
There’s a sort of cruel irony to passwords. The legitimate passwords people need to use to access crucial applications or data are often forgotten, and yet the bad guys seem to be able to crack passwords without breaking a sweat. Thankfully, there’s a free tool available that can help you in either of these cases—Cain & Abel.
What is Cain & Abel? It’s described as a Windows-based password recovery tool, but it does much, much more than just password recovery. The software can capture and monitor network traffic for passwords, crack encrypted passwords using various methods, record Voice over IP (VoIP) conversations, recover wireless network keys, and more.
Passwords are the keys to almost everything.Read more »
Putting technology expertise to work for your business. More by Tony Bradley
It seems that BlackBerry 10 is on track for an early 2013 release. RIM today announced the launch of a BlackBerry 10 Technical Preview program for 120 select customers.
Organizations participating in the BlackBerry 10 Technical Preview are getting early access to the new BlackBerry Enterprise Service 10 enterprise mobility management platform, as well as to a limited number of pre-production BlackBerry 10 smartphones. The beta will give these 120 organizations a chance to explore the features and benefits of BlackBerry 10, and provide valuable real-world feedback RIM can use to work out any remaining hiccups before BlackBerry 10 becomes available to the general public.
120 select customers will get an early look at BlackBerry 10 smartphones.Read more »
Putting technology expertise to work for your business. More by Tony Bradley
Most people have gotten past the sentiment that tablets can’t be used for “real work”. The simple reality is that a tablet is capable of doing most of the core functions a traditional PC can perform: email, Web surfing, social networking, instant messaging, and so forth. But, before you rush out to get a tablet to replace your laptop you should be aware that your choice of productivity apps may be dictated by your mobile platform.
Why? There are a variety of factors involved, and it depends on which combination of office suite and mobile platform you’re talking about.
Putting technology expertise to work for your business. More by Tony Bradley
Do you use Internet Explorer? If you do, hopefully you’ve already applied the updates from Patch Tuesday earlier this week. But, even if you did it seems your browser might still be vulnerable to a potentially serious issue.
Spider.io, a company in the business of helping customers distinguish between actual human website visitors and automated bot activity, claims to have discovered a flaw that affects Internet Explorer the current flagship browser from Microsoft, versions 6 through 10. The vulnerability reportedly allows the mouse cursor position to be tracked wherever it is on the screen—even if IE is minimized.
Spider.io disclosed the vulnerability to Microsoft on October 1, 2012, but it was not addressed in the most recent security update for Internet Explorer. Spider.io asserts that the flaw is being actively exploited, and claims the Microsoft Security Research Center (MSRC) has acknowledged the vulnerability, but has no immediate plan to patch it.
Putting technology expertise to work for your business. More by Tony Bradley
Social networks like Facebook are fertile territory for cyber attacks. The nature of a social network is that it connects you with other people you ostensibly know and trust—so you're more likely to open a message or click a link without thinking twice, which is a bad idea.
The Butterfly botnet that plagued Facebook earlier this year infected an estimated 11 million PCs and raked in roughly $850 million in ill-gotten gains. Facebook was instrumental in working with the FBI to shut down the threat, and to trace its origins to identify and arrest the perpetrators. Tal Be’ery, Web research team leader at Imperva, shares insight on the Yahos malware used to propagate the Butterfly botnet.
Putting technology expertise to work for your business. More by Tony Bradley
Today is the last Patch Tuesday of the year. There are seven new security bulletins from Microsoft this month, and five of them are rated "critical." If you use Windows, Microsoft Office, or Internet Explorer, you’ve got some work to do to get these new patches applied.
MS12-082 and MS12-083, security bulletins related to flaws in DirectPlay and IP-HTTPS respectively, are rated Important. The Critical security bulletins apply to the Windows operating system, Microsoft Office, the Internet Explorer Web browser, and Microsoft Exchange Server—and a few of them require a restart for the patch to take effect.
Putting technology expertise to work for your business. More by Tony Bradley
The paperless office doesn’t seem any closer to reality as flying cars do. As connected as everyone is, it would seem that printing documents or sending messages on paper should be on the verge of extinction, but a new survey indicates that we’re still wasting far more paper than we should be.
To find out how offices are using paper, Nitro, a digital documents and workflow company, surveyed more than 500 office workers, balanced by gender and spread across all regions of the country. The results illustrate a trend in the general direction of a paperless office, but the harsh reality is that paper appears to be a hard habit to break.
According to the Nitro survey, 42 percent of respondents send faxes “most of the time” or “always” (see infographic below). What does that even mean? Are there still people who don’t use email, instant messaging, or any other form of digital communication? It seems unlikely—if not impossible.
