What is Your Most Important Password?

I’ve harped on password security many times before. Today I’d like to tell you about the most important password in your possession. This one string of characters the only thing keeping the hordes at bay.

Take a minute to ponder the multitude of passwords you use for your various websites. If you’re like many people, you have an ordinary password for trivial stuff; then you have some stronger passwords for sites that involve money. For a long time, I have taken my passwords very seriously, which means keeping an encrypted file of all my passwords, itself protected with the most secure passphrase ever. No one’s getting into that!

But here’s the catch: bad guys don’t have to get into my master password vault. The only password they need is my primary email password.

How does my email password drop my trousers? Simple: if bad guys have access to my email, they can click “I forgot my password” on every site in the world and would have access to my entire world. If the evil monster cleared out the emails before I read them, I'd have no idea. And I’d be screwed.

Tech-savvy readers will be screaming two-factor at this point. But this article is for those who probably will never set up two-factor authentication. 

Two-factor aside, your primary email password is the password to protect and change regularly. You need to write it down and keep it in a safe place, such as one of these lovely password books, or Keeper Security's password vault.

Avast SafeZone Browser Security Flaw Discovered

More often than not I recommend and install Avast Free Antivirus for my clients personal computers. Avast has been my antivirus since 2007, and it has rarely let me down. It's fast, light, and efficient.

Free has its price, however, and the price is usually bloat and up-selling. Avast tries to increase their value proposition by offering new features and modules. These offers motivate users to upgrade to paid versions of Avast. Some of these additional features are excellent, yet others seem redundant concerning features already present in Windows and through other installed software. For this reason, I always choose custom installation and remove options I feel are redundant, such as the Avast SafeZone Browser.

Avast SafeZone browser was touted as a safe alternative to other browsers. Except SafeZone is just a rebranded version of the open-source Chromium browser, the software Chrome is built from.

In December 2015 a serious flaw was discovered in the SafeZone browser, which could allow a malicious website to read cookies, stored passwords and local files: PCWorld

If you feel SafeZone is redundant or unnecessary, you can follow the instructions below to remove it from your Windows system.

How to Remove Avast SafeZone Browser from Windows

1. Hit Windows-Pause to open the Control Panel of the operating system. 
2. Select "Control Panel Home", and on the screen that opens "uninstall a program". 
3. Scroll through the list of programs and select Avast Free Antivirus. 
4. Click Change, then click Modify and deselect the checkbox next to Avast SafeZone Browser.
5. Click Change.

The image below shows the options I typically install for my client's.

If you don't yet use Google's Chrome web browser, you can download and install it directly from Google at chrome.google.com.

If your opinion differs, please chime in via the comments below. I welcome any and all points of view.

Risk of Fire for Samsung Galaxy Note 7

A fully charged Galaxy Note 7 smartphone contains a wallop of stored energy. Penetrate one with an ice pick and you'll instantly create a deadly fire. Modern Lithium batteries have several times the energy density of regular lead acid batteries you find under the hood of your car, so you need to treat them with care and respect.

Most phones are very safe and will not explode without reason, like sitting on them in your back pocket or using the ice pick method above.

The Samsung Galaxy Note 7 is one notable and recent exception. If you've been avoiding the news lately, you may not know that these phones have become newsworthy in the past few weeks for exploding without warning.

If you have a Note 7, stop using it immediately and exchange it for a different model.

Samsung is currently in a firestorm of trouble surrounding these phones, and you may have some difficulty exchanging it until everyone gets the message that these phones are a serious public safety problem.
CNN Samsung shares plummet as Note 7 debacle deepens

c|net Exploding Samsung Galaxy Note 7 burns 6-year-old

4 Simple Rules For Password Security

The vast majority of computer users use weak passwords. Worse, they recycle the same passwords on multiple websites and services. These two bad habits make those people an easy target for hacking.

Why are recycled passwords dangerous? Passwords are stolen by the hundreds of millions and sold as bulk in the dark web allowing hackers from around the world to try your passwords on multiple websites.

Let's say you have a Linkedin account. You might not, but let's just pretend you do for this example. Your Linkedin password is something like myPass1953, and you use the same password for Gmail because it makes your life easy and you think you're safe because you only type these passwords on your home computer. Besides, this password is a good one you tell yourself.

Then this happens:

117 million LinkedIn emails and passwords from a hack just got posted online

But you're not a techie, and you don't read the techie news, so you miss this story, and quietly your password begins to circulate among thousands of hackers in dozens of countries around the world.

Leaked passwords are something like finding a bucket of keys in a parking lot. You have to go around and try a lot of doors before you find ones that work. But with passwords, hackers have programs to try them automatically by the thousands. Eventually, they discover your Gmail and Linkedin share the same password and username, and now they've got access to your email account.

Your email account is a master key. With a master key, they can not only reset your other passwords, but they can also troll your messages to discover your bank information and your whole world begins to unravel as they start to empty your bank accounts.

The easiest way to avoid this is to use these four easy rules:

1. Use a password manager to generate, store, and type your passwords for you.
2. Enable 2-Factor authentication on your email account and in your password manager.
3. Store your most important master passwords in a paper notebook and keep it in a locked drawer or safe.
4. Monitor your bank transactions in real-time using a service such as Mint.com.

These simple rules make you a hard target, and using a password manager makes everything easier because you only type a master password.

In future posts I will discuss the Keeper Password Manager, and the Google Authenticator for enabling 2-Factor authentication on your accounts.