No Phish for You! (Location Bar 2)

About a week or two ago, I stumbled upon this nugget and just had to share.

Anyone remotely concerned with keeping his or her machine secure and free of malware, viruses, worms, rootkits, etc. should already be using Firefox. That being said, there is one more weapon that you should wield.

My friends, I give you Location Bar 2. This is an add-on for Firefox that alters the appearance of your address bar. While it allows you to customize, the default setup shows the top level domain of the website that you are currently visited in a different format than the rest of the address (subdomains, folders, etc.).

So the next time that you click on a link that says that your ATM card was stolen, the address that it will show in the location bar will look something like this:

http://www.bankofamerica.fakesite.com/account_login.asp.

Instead of:

http://www.bankofamerica.fakesite.com/account_login.asp ... genius.

Until next time ...
-D

True Crypt

Traveling with data has always made me nervous because of the possibility of losing my thumb drive ... with passwords, FTP info, POP3 email (still working on a solution for that one), etc. This same problem transcends my thumb drive (no pun intended) ... the laptop is also a major problem.

My friends, I bring you True Crypt AND Portable True Crypt. Using this free, open source application, you can create an encrypted volume on your disk of choice (full disk, new partition, etc.).

The one downside is that the volume will not grow based on the amount of data inside. When you create the volume, you need to specify how much memory you want the volume to have.

Once you create the volume, unmount like you would any external drive (like a thumb drive for instance). The next time you mount the drive via True Crypt or Portable True Crypt, enter the password and you have access to your files again.

The recommendation for a more secure password includes letters (upper and lowercase), numbers, and symbols totaling at least 20 characters.

At this point in time, I believe this is Linux and Windows only. For our Mac users, you can accomplish the same thing using Disk Utility or can opt to encrypt the entire drive.

Until next time ...
-D