Those of us who spend a lot of time on the ‘net and download a lot of stuff always have to guard against all manner of threats. And one way to do that is to keep your software up to date.
Firefox has announced a browser upgrade that fixes a serious security hole. You can
DL the newest, fixed, version here. It seems that version 3.5 has a problem that will allow malware to be installed on your computer while you are browsing without you downloading, opening, or running anything. So if you’ve installed Firefox prior to July 16th, go get the new version and install it. Takes just a sec and you don’t have to reboot!
But that’s nothing compared to what happened to twitter.com a little while ago! They were hacked badly, and to add insult to injury, they got into the CEO’s wife’s gmail account by changing her password. How did they do that? They just GUESSED the answers to those ‘security questions’ they ask when you go to reset your password! The article I linked to above recommends giving fake answers to questions like: “What city were you born in” or the name of your elementary school. Problem is you have to remember the fake answers!
I saw another post that had great ideas for passwords - one of the ones I liked best was to take the first letter of each word of a familiar phrase or song – iyhaykicyh is If You’re Happy And You Know It Clap Your Hands! Make it stronger by changing some letters to numbers a=1, b=2, c=3 etc. That would give us iyh1yki3yh. Pretty random!
I downloaded the firefox fix today, and still swear by FF over IE for security. Does anyone use a different browser? Do you feel secure?
Scrap safely!
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July 18, 2009
Mary K
Jenn,
Another option for responding to those security questions is not to make up an answer but to use complete sentences. There’s nothing that says you have to have one-word answers. If the web site won’t accept multiple words, you can always use the underscore like this: I_was_born_in…