This is going to be quick and I promise that I won’t bug any of you about Passwords for a while. You will remember in Thursday’s TechnoRant© on Freeware that I would be evaluating the LastPass password manager. Whilst I was nosing around the lastpass.com website, I ran across a blog entry on password security. The post explains how weak/poor choices of passwords is endemic amongst internet users. Weak passwords are responsible for 80% of security breaches. This post is one that is definitely worth a few minutes of your time to read.
My review of LastPass will be online in a day or so.
And I’m not talking about music here. The hackers – and hackettes since this sort of thing is an equal opportunity enterprise – have tasted the forbidden fruit and found Apple’s OS X to be quite tasty. There is a rapidly spreading variant of the Flashback Trojan called Flashback.S which is able to install itself WITHOUT a password.
Like its predecessors, Flashback.S exploits a vulnerability in Java. Apple was supposed to have issued a patch for it but . . .
This article gives a pretty good rundown of the situation and even includes a download which will detect and remove all variants of the Flashback pestilence.
Dr. Data’s advice to all Mac users is to get anti-virus protection . . . NOW!!! The article lists a number of both paid and free security solutions for OS X.
You have been warned!