The Armor Techs Blog

For the past five years, we have become surrounded by hundreds of different internet-connected devices: from smart door locks, smart switches, and smart light bulbs, to smart speakers, smart security cameras, smart thermostats, and smart sm...

As more and more of our lives are online, the chance of encountering a cyberattack increases. One of the most popular versions of cyberattacks today is through ransomware. But what exactly is ransomware, how can we protect ourselves and our...

Welcome to a new month, same problems. Last month, it became public knowledge that the city of Chicago had paid over $1,000,000 to a currently unnamed person or persons. How? The city was tricked by a phishing email that asked them to chang...

I don't know if you've been watching the tech news space recently, but if you have, you've probably at least seen mention of the fact that Facebook apparently stored some user's passwords in plaintext. Plaintext, of course, ...

Oh man, Wordpress 5 is a thing now, and has been for a while now (since December 6th, for those keeping count at home), but have you updated to it? The tone of a lot of these security updates might make you think I'm joking, but I'm...

Security Myths You Need To Stop Believing This guest post was witten by Jack Foster To read more of his work, head over to VPN Geeks. The Internet is a fantastic resource for information, where anyone can upload his or her knowledge to the ...

It's 2019, and if we could sum up technology news from the last year, it would probably sound a little like this: Big Data is invasive, everywhere, poorly protected, and often used without ethical consideration. Accepting all of that is...

Two hackers walk into a website . . . This isn't just the start of a joke, it's a very real occurence, and what happens next can depend on a number of factors. Types of Hackers First, you have your white-hat hackers. These are secur...

Email has long been the preferred method of communication for businesses and individuals across the internet. Unfortunately, with the popularity of this medium and the fact that it can be relatively insecure, email has also been a preferred...

Happy Holidays everyone. Did you know that the United States Post Office left an unpatched security vulnerability in an API that let users scrape information about any one of the millions of people in their database, and more terrifyingly, ...

What a month October 2018 was: Facebook had another breach; Google was caught not disclosing their own, and in reaction shuts down the consumer service for Google+ (and it's 2 users). And hey, turns out there's a scandal brewing abo...

Introduction Everyone using a PC nowadays knows how important it is to have some sort of antivirus installed. The question usually comes up, but which one should I install? Should I pay for antivirus software? Do I need to install more than...

Happy September everyone. The internet is still a vast hellscape of people who want to steal from you. So, business as usual. This month's topic is email, and all the ways it can be used to steal from you or damage you or your company&#...

The (Sad) State of Internet Security The Armor Techs' blog is full of posts discussing security and passwords, and this post is going to be in much of the same vein. The security of your data on the web is becoming (read: has always bee...

A Quick Change Of Format We've been watching the statistics on these security blog posts, and they are among our least read content, so we're going to mess with the content a little. Instead of taking more of a marketing/newsletter ...

A basic diagram of what Phishing boils down to. What is it? Phishing (pronounced "fishing") is the process of "fishing" for more information about a person, often by posing as a source they would have no qualms about giv...

INTRODUCTION Every week, someone brings a device into Armor because of malware. Every day, the AV-TEST Institute registers over 350,000 new malicious programs (malware) and potentially unwanted applications (PUA). These are examined using t...

INTRODUCTION The problems with a password are obvious: the login system was first designed for time-sharing computers in the 1960s, working on mainframes that took up an entire lab. To use the computer, you tapped in your login name and pas...

Introduction to GDPR If you're even a semi-regular internet user, you've probably seen this in the last month: you log into your favorite service, like Facebook or Twitter, and see a huge notification, "We have updated our priv...

Picture it: you're on Facebook doing the usual—checking on family, clicking links to interesting articles that might come up in your feed, or even playing those (sometimes ridiculous) Facebook games. Out of nowhere, a window appea...

General Security News In the good news column for April, Dutch Police raided and took down the online DDoS marketplace Webstresser, which sold DDoS attacks for relatively low prices. Additionally for the first time ever, Microsoft developed...

Chicago-based Orbitz was in the news this month for a data breach. The consensus seems to be that the breach took place sometime between October 2016 and December 2017. If you're wondering how a company that builds itself on successfull...

Let's be upfront: it's 2018, and if you've been paying even partial attention to the news, you know that the trend for technology stories is [Company] Data [Breach/Leak] day after day. According to self-reported data, compa...

A virtual private network (VPN) is a technology that creates a network-encrypted tunnel into your firewall, maintaining a level of security that is often important for businesses. This basically simulates an internal network connection thro...

All of the online security in the world can be useless if it depends on a weak password. Statistically speaking 95% of users use an insecure or repeated password that puts them at much greater risk for breach of data. In 2015 2 in 5 people ...

On Monday October 2nd at 6:00pm we will be changing the password transmission policies of our server. Up until this point we have permitted cleartext logins and logins with older encryption protocols, while adding support and recommending n...