Twitter Hacked
// July 20th, 2009 // No Comments » // Computers
TWITTER HACKED
Mini Blog Supersite Twitter, was on the receiving end of an embarrassing story last week, when they were hacked by a guy named, Hacker Croll.
Hacker Croll is a white hat hacker, which means that he hacks companies systems to show them where their vulnerabilities are; rather than with malicious intent. It would have been easy for him to bring down the entire network, but thankfully he chose to be the nice guy.
Of course, Twitter did not ask him to expose them; but after Twitter CEO Evan Williams downplayed the Fiasco – Hacker Croll sent the 301 documents to Techcrunch.com to prove how much information he actually managed to obtain, such as financial projections and personal information on staff members.
Read the whole article here at www.techcrunch.com
Here are some tips and suggestions to help you tighten up your computers security with some great open-source applications.
Every PC on the WWW is vulnerable to attack and it’s very easy to make the mistake of being too relaxed about security.
Often the cost of specialised software is out of the reach of the normal breadwinner, so its not a priority and thus gets neglected. Bad move !!
Thankfully there is always a good-guy and a buddy who is willing to help, in the world of IT, those good-guys are The Open Source Community. TheOpen Source Community, consists of tens of thousands of developers who all work together to perfect the design of software and who all share their knowledge and expertise to create the perfect piece of code.
Besides not being able to afford much of the commercial software, I am very aware of how much of the computers resources, certain popular brands of security software uses, many of the commercial products are too focused on appearance and thus slow your PC down unnecessarily and often are more of a pain than anything else.
I have listed below the software that should be installed on your PC, to help prevent infections of SpyWare and Viruses – they are all FREE and they all work brilliantly.
ANTI SPYWARE
Spyware is a little progrme that sits in your PC and reports your activities to advertising servers, which then it turn bombard you with advertising messages. Spyware can be alot more malicious and report on your banking details and other personal information, their favourite trick is to use all of your email contacts to spread.
To help prevent , I suggest that you use the two following programs, install them both as both secure different areas of your machine.
1. Spyware Doctor (runs in the background)
2. Spybot Search and Destroy (For scanning and active protection)
Both of these products are full featured, with the only exception being automatic updates, so you will have to update manually once a week. Its just a few clicks, so its really easy.
ANTI VIRUS
Looking for free Open Source Antivirus for Windows? Download ClamWin Free Antivirus and get free virus scanning and free virus definition updates.
Clamwin, does an excellent job and I find it far supperior to most of the expensive antivirus applications out there.
OFFICE SOFTWARE
Lets just say that how anybody can pay so many thousands of rands for a certain package of office applications, is beyond my comprehension. there was even an article about it in the paper here.
OpenOffice.org – The Free and Open Productivity Suite
A multiplatform and multilingual office suite and an open-source project. Compatible with all other major office suites, works wonderfully and is in my opinion, betterthan MS office as you can save in any format and you can open any format, as well as export any document to pdf.
EMAIL AND INTERNET BROWSER
Mozilla | Firefox web browser & Thunderbird email client
Mozilla is a global community dedicated to building free, open source products like the award winning Firefox web browser and Thunderbird email software.
All of this software is Free, Works perfectly and will help you run a safer PC and be more productive. So all I can say is “Welcome to the Open Source Community”
(Legal Stuff) This is for information purposes only and you are entirely responsible for what you do or don’t do with your PC.
Although it is good advice, its free advice and I hope that you understand that I can’t be held accountable for any consequences of following this advice.
Should you need specific information or further assistance please contact me on 087 808 5321
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