Tag: useless | SpinSafe

Planes dropping out of the sky. Your mobile rendered useless, just like your car. As a Netflix film portrays a nightmare that security experts insist is a very real prospect… How will YOU survive on the day an enemy state switches off the internet?

January 6, 2024/in Internet Security

An oil tanker ploughs into a tourist beach. Planes fall from the sky. Driverless cars run amok. The internet fails and the mobile network dies. Feral instincts take over as people fight for food, water and medicine amid the ruins of civilisation.

That is the nightmare vision depicted in Leave The World Behind, Netflix‘s recent hit film starring Julia Roberts and Ethan Hawke as a couple battling societal breakdown when the technology that underpins civilisation collapses.

It’s fictional, but it touches on deep-seated, real-life fears.

The film is produced by Michelle and Barack Obama‘s company, Higher Ground. The ex-president was closely involved in shaping the plot, which dramatises many of the cyber-security issues on which he was briefed during his eight years in the White House.

For our 21st-century lives are almost entirely dependent on complex technologies that many do not understand — and that can so easily be exploited by our enemies.

Maintaining a car, for example, was previously a job for any competent motorist and their local mechanic. Now our vehicles are computers on wheels, their inner workings a mystery.

A scene from Leave The World Behind. The film is produced by Michelle and Barack Obama’s company, Higher Ground

A nightmare vision of the future is depicted in Leave The World Behind, Netflix’s recent hit film starring Julia Roberts and Ethan Hawke as a couple battling societal breakdown when the technology that underpins civilisation collapses

We used to navigate with paper maps and landmarks. But with his car’s satnav out of action, Ethan Hawke’s character Clay Sandford is unable even to find his way to the nearby town.

Our telephone system used to run on sturdy copper wires, with handsets you could fix with a screwdriver. Now it is a branch of cyberspace.

So, too, is finance. Remember when a credit card’s embossed number left an imprint on a paper slip? Not any more. Our payment system depends wholly on electronic encryption.

What use is cash in the modern world? In the film, with the internet gone, it becomes a prized asset.

If the technologies we rely on break down, many of us will be as helpless as Hawke’s Clay Sandford. ‘I am a useless man,’…

Source…

Android Antivirus Apps Are Useless

July 10, 2021/in Computer Security

Android has grown to grow to be the biggest computing platform on the planet, and that makes it a goal. You possibly can’t spend a lot time on the web with out listening to about some new piece of Android malware that’s going to positively, 100 p.c wreck your telephone. These studies are all the time based mostly in truth, however they will overstate the true dangers of choosing up a chunk of malware, and the definition of malware will be fairly imprecise. Safety corporations are normally pushing a virus scanning app of some kind. Nevertheless, Android is by its very nature safer than a desktop pc, so perhaps you don’t want these safety apps. You’ve most likely already bought what you want.

The Scare Techniques

In a 2019 report from AV-Comparatives, we realized that many of the antivirus apps on Android don’t even do something to verify apps for malicious conduct. They only use white/blacklists to flag apps, which is ineffective and makes them little greater than promoting platforms with some pretend buttons. Surprising and upsetting, proper? They’ll get away with it as a result of true Android viruses that take over your gadget usually are not as widespread as you’d count on. “Malware” can embody milder threats like apps that harvest private data or set off pop-up advertisements. You continue to need to keep away from these, after all, however malware scanners aren’t going to assist.

Android and different cell platforms have their roots within the fashionable period when programmers understood the hazards of the web. We’ve all been programmed what to anticipate by PC malware, which might sneak onto your system merely since you visited the improper web site with a susceptible browser. These “drive-by downloads” aren’t possible on Android and not using a pre-existing an infection. On Android, it’s important to bodily faucet on a notification to put in an APK downloaded from a supply outdoors the Play Retailer. Even then, there are safety settings that should be manually bypassed. That’s to not say it’s unimaginable for Android to have a extreme zero-day bug that enables somebody to sneak apps…

Source…