Tag Archive for: safe

How to keep your bitcoin safe from hackers with Trezor Safe 3

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There’s a saying in crypto: Not your keys, not your coins.

While this is true, it’s also worth considering what “your” means, exactly. If, for example, you keep your cryptocurrency private key in an unprotected text file residing on your hard drive, your coins may be “yours,” but they are fairly easy for hackers to steal.

With a hardware wallet, it’s another matter.

Why use a hardware wallet?

A hardware wallet is a device designed specifically to keep your cryptocurrency safe. Typically, it’s a small gadget with no other use case than to store your BTC, ETH, or whichever digital asset you fancy.

Hardware wallets almost always have a “secure element,” which includes a chip designed to guard your data from malicious apps and attacks. They also typically have a passphrase that lets you access the data stored on the wallet.

Yes, you can choose to gain access to your bitcoin via an app on your computer or phone. But these devices do a million other things besides securing crypto. You probably have dozens of apps installed, and as well as access to a variety of websites and services, thereby increasing the chance of something malicious sneaking in.

Conversely, crypto hardware wallets only have one app for the following purposes: send, receive, and secure your crypto. That’s it. Nothing else goes in or out.

Testing the Trezor Safe 3

For the purpose of this article, I’ve used the newly launched Trezor Safe 3 (Bitcoin Edition), a $79 wallet from Trezor. This particular hardware wallet is interesting because it’s even more straightforward to understand and use than other devices; it’s specifically designed to secure your bitcoin. No fuss, no complications: You guard your bitcoin with Trezor Safe 3, keep it somewhere safe (no pun intended), and never touch it until you need to access it.

The Trezor Safe has two buttons and a tiny, 0.96-inch, monochromatic OLED display. It’s connected to your computer via a USB-C port. It’s a simple device with a singular purpose — and many users will appreciate that.

Setting up Trezor Safe 3

Setting it up is easy. Download and install Trezor’s software, crack open the packaging on the device itself, and connect it to your computer via a USB-C cable. The…

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Can true crime stories about the internet keep individuals safe from cybercrime?

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If you were to visit the office of Joe Carrigan, a senior security engineer at Johns Hopkins University’s Information Security Institute (ISI), you’d notice a television screen displaying a looping slideshow. Among the featured content in the loop is a 2022 article from The New York Times, which recognizes his podcast for delving into discussions about the “dark side of the internet.”

That podcast is Hacking Humans, cohosted by Dave Bittner, who is also a producer for the pod by way of CyberWire, a B2B cybersecurity audio network. Hacking Humans focuses on the human side of cybersecurity problems.

“The idea of the Hacking Humans podcast is that it’s not a very technical podcast,” Carrigan said. We don’t talk about vulnerabilities, you know — we mention them tangentially, we mention them as necessary.”

According to Carrigan, a University of Maryland Global Campus computer science program alum, many people believe hackers are only interested in high-profile targets like nation-state actors or penetration testers. But anyone can become a target if they don’t protect themselves.

The Columbia, Maryland resident cited a country-by-county pay gap as a possible influence for those who might be employed by “scam centers” in countries like India and Nigeria — both known contributors to cyber crime, he said.

“If you look at the two countries, the average American makes around 73 times what the people in Nigeria and India make per year,” Carrigan told Technical.ly. “… If these guys [scammers] can scam somebody out of 25 bucks every day, seven days or six or seven days a week, in a year, they make three to four times what the average income is in their country, and they’re doing well.”

The podcast aims to bridge the gap between more technical cybersecurity discussions and the general public.

On a recent episode of the podcast (Season 6, Episode 262), for instance, Bittner — who is also an alumnus of the University of Maryland system — sounds surprised as Carrigan presents findings from a survey about people’s understanding of cybersecurity, including the jargon commonly used in the field. The survey was conducted by ISI and commissioned by…

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Keeping your computer safe is topic of Nov. 14 Friends of Oak Ridge National Lab lecture

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“How to keep your computer (and you) safe” is the topic of the next Friends of Oak Ridge National Laboratory monthly noon lecture meeting on Tuesday, Nov. 14.

The speaker will be James A. “Jim” Rome, a retired ORNL researcher who has expertise on computer security and is a webmaster for several nonprofit organizations, including FORNL.

James A. "Jim" RomeJames A. "Jim" Rome

James A. “Jim” Rome

He will deliver his lecture at the UT Resource Center, 1201 Oak Ridge Turnpike. Attendees may bring their own lunch to eat. To view the virtual noon lecture, click on the talk title on the homepage of the www.fornl.org website and then click on the Zoom link near the top of the page describing the lecture.

“Computer crime is a multi-trillion dollar business,” Rome said. “Unfortunately, the bad guys are winning. I will speak on how to proactively take steps to remain safe on the internet and how to protect your devices.”

Rome, who calls himself “a computer security paranoid,” spent the latter part of his career at ORNL providing computer security for classified systems.

After receiving four degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he started his career in 1971 at ORNL as a theoretical plasma physicist with the Fusion Energy Division, where he conducted research for 25 years. He specialized in doing configuration design and following charged particle orbits in fusion devices.

In the 1970s when personal computers first became available, Rome co-write a scientific graphics program, called GraphiC, for PCs.

He later moved to ORNL’s Computer Science and Mathematics Division, where he specialized in air traffic analysis and worked on making computer workstations “multi-level secure.”

He managed ORNL computer security for the National Science Foundation’s TeraGrid, a high-speed network that connected supercomputers and facilities at many universities. He also created a public key infrastructure to enable secure, encrypted logins and access to online Lab Notebooks.

Rome is author or co-author of 155 publications, and a fellow of the American Physical Society.  You can learn more about him on his jamesrome.net website.

This article originally appeared on Oakridger: Keeping your computer safe is…

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NAB Responds: Keeping your money safe

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NAB Retail Customer Executive, Larna Manson, on keeping your money safe:

 

We want to help you to do your banking safely. When you withdraw large amounts of cash or make a transfer that is unusual for you, we might ask you a few extra questions. We do this with your best interests at heart as sadly, we too often see the devastating impacts that scammers have by socially engineering people. We’ve asked our teams to provide you the best service by making sure you aren’t being put under pressure as part of a scam or criminal activity.

From suspicious emails, unusual requests to unexpected phone calls, we can help you learn how to spot a scam.

If you’re ever unsure if a call, SMS or email is really from NAB, here are some simple tips to keep in mind:

  • We have removed links from our text messages. If you get an SMS from NAB with a link in it, it’s likely a scam. Delete it and report it to [email protected].
  • We’ll never send links via email or SMS to direct you to log into your NAB Internet Banking or NAB Connect.
  • We will never ask you to transfer your money to another account to keep it safe – it’s safe where it is.

For more information, head to nab.com.au/security where you can sign-up to one of our free monthly security webinars. These are free for all Australians to sign-up to.

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