Wednesday 21 January 2015

Explaining Ransomware to a five year old [Link - TechWeek Europe]

I was asked to write a piece about explaining Ransomware to a five year old.  Here was my response:


“Imagine that your house is like a computer and your toys are the games on the computer. Ransomware is like a stranger coming into your house and hiding all of your toys so you can’t find them. The stranger will ask for money to tell you where your toys are, but if you don’t pay, you will never see your toys again. If you pay the money, the stranger might give back your toys, but they might also leave the toys hidden anyway. To stop the stranger from hiding your toys, you need to stop the stranger from coming into your house, or you need to ask a grown up to find the stranger before they can hide your toys.
“Just like keeping your toys safe, to stop the ransomware from entering a computer, or to find any ransomware on your computer, you would use anti-malware or anti-virus software.”

Thursday 15 January 2015

Death of the password? [Link - ITProPortal]

I was asked to write an article about two factor authentication and the death of the password.  It was an edited version of an old blog post, but still as relevant as ever.

http://www.itproportal.com/2015/01/15/two-factor-authentication-death-p4ssw0rd/