7 smart steps to get your Android phone in tip-top shape for 2022

Credit to Author: JR Raphael| Date: Wed, 05 Jan 2022 03:00:00 -0800

Happy New Year! I don’t know about you, but I find the start of a fresh voyage around this shiny ol’ sun of ours to be a fine time for tidying up, optimizing, and getting good and organized for the months ahead. And while I’d love to pretend I’m the type of person who has one of those disgustingly pristine, clutter-free desks you see on the internet, let me be brutally honest: The physical space around me tends to resemble a half-abandoned hog parlor.

But my Android phone? My Android phone is as orderly as can be, gosh darn it. And if you ask me, that makes far more of a difference than the state of the physical space around me.

Our mobile devices are where we do so much of our actual work and contemplation these days, after all — and yet it’s all too easy to overlook the importance of maintaining an optimal arrangement for both productivity and security within ’em. So now, as we gaze ahead at the promise-filled 2022 calendar, join me in taking 10 minutes to get your own trusty Android phone fine-tuned and fully ready for the coming year.

To read this article in full, please click here

Read more

When biometrics can be outsmarted this way, we need to talk

Credit to Author: Evan Schuman| Date: Mon, 03 Jan 2022 06:43:00 -0800

It’s one of the sad facts of mobile authentication that the industry tends to initially support the least effective security options. Hence, phones initially supported authentication based on fingerprints (which can be impacted by prescriptions, cleaning products, hand injuries, and dozens of other factors) and then moved on to facial recognition. 

In theory, facial recognition is supposed to be more accurate. Mathematically, that’s fair, as it is examining far more data points than scanning a fingerprint. But the reality in the real world is much more problematic. It requires a precise distance from the phone and yet offers no pre-scan markers for the user to know when they hit it correctly. That’s one reason I see facial recognition reject a scan roughly 40% of the time — even though it will approve a positive scan two seconds later.

To read this article in full, please click here

Read more

12 security tips for the ‘work from home’ enterprise

Credit to Author: Jonny Evans| Date: Fri, 13 Mar 2020 06:26:00 -0700

If you or your employees are working from home while our governments lurch awkwardly through the current crisis, then there are several security considerations that must be explored.

Your enterprise outside the wall

Enterprises must consider the consequences of working from home in terms of systems access, access to internal IT infrastructure, bandwidth costs and data repatriation.

What this means, basically, is that when your worker accesses your data and/or databases remotely, then the risk to that data grows.

While at normal times the risk is only between the server, internal network and end user machine, external working adds public internet, local networks and consumer-grade security systems to the risk mix.

To read this article in full, please click here

Read more

Apple, the FIDO Alliance and the future of passwords


Apple is the latest firm to join the FIDO Alliance, an industry standards group developing more secure ways to log in to online accounts and apps using multi-factor authentication (MFA), biometric authentication and physical security keys. Computerworld's Lucas Mearian joins Ken Mingis and Juliet Beauchamp to discuss the Apple move, how different forms of authentication work and how far away we are from a password-less world.

Read more

A week in security (March 2 – 8)

Credit to Author: Malwarebytes Labs| Date: Mon, 09 Mar 2020 20:07:46 +0000

A roundup of the previous week’s security headlines, including the introduction of a new series on child identity theft, an examination of law enforcement’s cybersecurity woes, a progress check on our stalkerware initiative, and more coronavirus scammers on the prowl.

Categories:

Tags:

(Read more…)

The post A week in security (March 2 – 8) appeared first on Malwarebytes Labs.

Read more

Bring your own privacy: VPNs for consumers and orgs

Credit to Author: Malwarebytes Labs| Date: Fri, 06 Mar 2020 17:24:33 +0000

VPNs are all the rage, but they’re not without their problems. Where do you stand on the great “Should we deploy a VPN” debate?

Categories:

Tags:

(Read more…)

The post Bring your own privacy: VPNs for consumers and orgs appeared first on Malwarebytes Labs.

Read more

Verizon: Companies will sacrifice mobile security for profitability, convenience

Credit to Author: Lucas Mearian| Date: Tue, 03 Mar 2020 03:00:00 -0800

Despite an increase in the number of companies hit by mobile attacks that led to compromises, four in 10 businesses sacrificed security to meet profit goals or avoid “cumbersome” security processes, according to Verizon’s third annual Mobile Security Index 2020.

It showed that 43% of organizations sacrificed security. More typical reasons for companies exposing themselves to risk, such as lack of budget and IT expertise, trailed “way behind” things such as expediency (62%), convenience (52%) and  profitability targets (46%). Lack of budget and IT expertise were only cited by 27% and 26% of respondents, respectively.

To read this article in full, please click here

Read more

Will pay by palm be a thing? Should it be?

Credit to Author: Evan Schuman| Date: Tue, 03 Mar 2020 03:00:00 -0800

Amazon is experimenting with a way to allow shoppers to use a palm-print biometric to authenticate payments and to do so in physical stores far beyond Amazon-owned brick-and-mortars, (Whole Foods, AmazonGo, AmazonBooks, Amazon 4-Star and Amazon Pop-Up). Amazon is reportedly looking at QSRs (quick-service restaurants), especially coffee shops.

Palm prints have several advantages over more popular mobile biometric methods, such as fingerprint (prescription drugs, cleaning chemicals, burns and various other things can interfere with fingerprint readings) and facial recognition (finicky method that requires the face to be a precise distance from the scanner — not an inch too close or too far — and can suffer from hair growth, lighting, cosmetic changes, some sunglasses, as well as giving false positives to close relatives). And unlike my favorite biometric for security (retina scan), it’s far less invasive. It’s fairly accurate, convenient and (other than forcing customers to remove gloves, which could be a problem with outdoor shops in the winter) should be well-received.

To read this article in full, please click here

Read more