Hackers are not all bad………..many late hours are spent in front of a computer, working on computer programs to find their vulnerabilities. About three dozen young people in the Seattle area are the “white hat” hackers who work for Internet security companies.

With the Seattle area being a high-tech hub, it’s only natural that about 10 such firms or branches of firms exist there.

Cyberattacks are costing corporations and consumers a lot of money. In a six-year span starting in 2005, data breaches in 33 countries, including the U.S., cost the firms involved more than $156 billion, says the nonprofit Digital Forensics Association.

Every second, in various parts of the world, there are 18 cybercrime victims — some 1.6 million a day — says a 2012 Norton by Symantec study.

Those who engaged in “computer-related deviance” — such as downloading pirated music or pornographic images — were more likely to be victims of identity theft, the study found. This is a large risk for users because pirated movies and music may contain malware and place users at risk for harm. ?But the most practical news for computer users was the combined protective factor of the antivirus, anti-spyware and anti-adware software, each of which has a different function for keeping a computer safe, Holt said.? Antivirus software detects and removes malicious software programs such as viruses and worms that can corrupt a computer, delete data and spread to other computers. Anti-spyware and anti-adware programs, meanwhile, are designed to protect against software that either self-installs without the user’s knowledge or is installed by the user and enables information to be gathered covertly about a person’s Internet use, passwords and so on.?”You have a much better chance of not getting your credit card number stolen if you have all three forms of protective software,” Holt said.

Internet Security………..An Ever Present Challenge

IT security professionals are doing a better job than in the past at dealing with the numerous Internet threats that are out there, according to IBM’s “and Risk Report,” which the company officially released March 22,2012. The amount of spam reported by the X-Force 2011 Trend and Risk Report email dropped in 2011 from 2010, and there were significant improvements in vulnerability patching and software application code. In a release about the report, IBM officials referred to what they called “surprising improvements.” However, the IBM report also reinforced the idea that businesses face cyber-criminals who are nimble and adaptable. Attackers are switching their focus into new areas, such as mobile devices, social media and cloud computing. There has been a surge of activity in some traditional threats, such as phishing. Tom Cross, manager of threat intelligence and strategy for IBM X-Force, noted that he saw “surprisingly good progress” by the tech industry in improving the quality of software. However, attackers have evolved their techniques. “As long as attackers profit from cyber-crime, organizations should remain diligent in prioritizing and addressing their vulnerabilities,” said Cross.

“A lot of people feel, ‘Oh, everything is really on my computer.’ However, the more we transfer everything onto the web, onto the cloud, the less we’re going to have control over it.”

Click here to read the details.

A New Hampshire man filed suit against Yahoo this week alleging that lax security measures allowed hackers to get into a Yahoo database and steal passwords from 450,000 accounts.

Click here to read the details.

A hacker group calling itself D33DS posted online a massive amount of data it said was unencrypted in a file stolen from the Sunnyvale, California-based Internet pioneer “as a wake-up call not as a threat.”

Yahoo confirmed that a file from its Contributor Network (formerly Associated Content) containing approximately 450,000 Yahoo and other company users names and passwords was compromised on Wednesday. Security researchers who sifted through the posted data determined that it included information about accounts at other online services including Google’s web-based Gmail, AOL, and Microsoft’s Live.com.

“We apologize to all affected users,” Yahoo said in a prepared statement.

“We are taking immediate action by fixing the vulnerability that led to the disclosure of this data, changing the passwords of the affected Yahoo users and notifying the companies whose users accounts may have been compromised.”

The company contended that less than five percent of the Yahoo account data stolen had valid passwords.

Click here to read about how a password can be cracked by brute force.

New “contactless payment” methods are making it easier for smartphones to eventually replace wallets. We can now use smartphones to buy our morning lattes and take cash payments from our friends. Google entered the mobile payment space last year with its aptly named Google Wallet, which aims to make the traditional wallet obsolete.

But digital payment methods may not be for everyone.

What does your wallet say about you and how you will be paying for items in the near future?

Click here to read about how digital payments will take the place of wallets.

216.27.61.137

The four numbers in an IP address are called octets, because they each have eight positions when viewed in binary form. If you add all the positions together, you get 32, which is why IP addresses are considered 32-bit numbers. Since each of the eight positions can have two different states (1 or 0) the total number of possible combinations per octet is 28 or 256. So each octet can contain any value between 0 and 255. Combine the four octets and you get 232 or a possible 4,294,967,296 unique values!

Out of the almost 4.3 billion possible combinations, certain values are restricted from use as typical IP addresses. For example, the IP address 0.0.0.0 is reserved for the default network and the address 255.255.255.255

http://whatismyipaddress.com/