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Twitter’s ditching of free text-message authentication doesn’t mean that you should forgo using 2FA. Instead, switch to another – and, indeed, better – 2FA option. Starting today, Twitter is disabling SMS-based two-factor authentication (2FA) for all but paying users following a decision that, not unlike other recent moves by the social media giant, has been met with controversy that has reverberated far beyond the Twitterverse. “While historically a popular form of 2FA, unfortunately, we have…

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by Paul Ducklin Even if you’ve never used one, you probably know what a VCR is (or was). Short for video cassette recorder, it was how we recorded and watched back videos at home in the days when digital video stored on hard disks was the absurdly expensive privilege of huge companies, typically TV stations. The cassettes were small plastic containers that held two reels and a long strip of magnetic recording tape – kind…

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by Paul Ducklin There are plenty of military puns in operating system history. Unix famously has a whole raft of personnel known as Major Number, who organise the batallions of devices such as disk drives, keyboards and webcams in your system. Microsoft once struggled with the apparently incompetent General Failure, who was regularly spotted trying to read your DOS disks and failing. Linux has intermittently has trouble with Colonel Panic, whose appearance is typically followed…

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Scammers are looking to cash in on the chaos that has set in following the startling meltdowns of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank and the crisis at Credit Suisse When mayhem, panic and chaos set in – as has been the case following the meltdowns of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) and Signature Bank and the struggles of Credit Suisse in recent days – cybercriminals jump in and seize the opportunity. In this video, Tony…

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How cybercriminals can exploit Silicon Valley Bank’s downfall for their own ends – and at your expense Big news events and major crises usually trigger an avalanche of follow-on phishing attempts. The COVID-19 pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine are perhaps the most obvious examples, but the most recent one is the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB). The mid-sized US lender and a key financer of tech start-ups held tens of billions of dollars’…

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