Tuesday, 18 August, 2009
A reader who wishes to remain anonymous is concerned about a very scary looking website. I attempt to calm the waters.
I used Yahoo to search for something and was sent immediately to the following [redacted] site. I believe my Mac was invaded and don’t know what to do!
First, relax. Your Mac wasn’t invaded, infected, compromised, co-opted, or conquered. If you’d clicked through a few of those dire pop-up warnings you might have been as amused as I was to see a phony Windows Security Alert appear on a Macintosh. What you’ve encountered is termed “scareware”—a scam that attempts to frighten those confronted with these pages into downloading a hunk of software that will allegedly deal with the problem.
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Tuesday, 7 April, 2009
VeriSign has released an iPhone app that lets you supplement a user name and password login at several Web sites with a well-regarded and cryptographically robust method of confirming your identity. AOL, eBay, and PayPal are notable among current sites supporting the system.
The free VIP Access for Mobile application relies on a unique credential created for your iPhone based on its phone number, and confirmed with an SMS message sent to that number. Once the credential is confirmed with this looped-back process, the program generates a unique 6-digit token every 30 seconds using an algorithm that’s uniquely derived from the credential. (VIP stands for VeriSign Identity Protection.)
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