(Image via Reddit) It’s the holiday season and that means more people are traveling and spending time in airports, bus/train stations, and generally wondering if the next stop, coffee shop or store has free Wi-Fi. The habitual curiosity is understandable – why use your cell data when you can hook up to a free connection to the web, right? In fact, there’s always a couple of questions I seem to get on this subject when people find out I’m a security professional. They are: What do you think about public Wi-Fi? Is free Wi-Fi safe to use? Is it ok to use the Wi-Fi at the airport?

The holiday season means holiday shopping and while everyone will be looking for a bargain, it’s important to make sure you don’t get something you weren’t bargaining for. A new study from ADI predicts that this holiday shopping season will be the first to break $100 billion in online sales, with more than half of those sales coming from mobile devices. Here are some online shopping safety tips:

Twinkle, Twinkle, little star, How I wonder what you are! Up above the world so high, Like an Access Point providing Wi-Fi!

We are quickly entering a time in which the laws and regulations are outpaced by the exponential growth of technology. Who will be held accountable when an IMD (Implantable Medical Device) -- such as an ICD (Implantable Cardioverter Defibrillators) -- with Wi-Fi connectivity receives an erroneous data transmission from a spoofed doctor’s account changing the patient's normal heart rhythm for an abnormal one?

As I browse the aisles of Home Depot and Lowes, it’s quite impressive and, at the same time unsettling as an IT Security Professional to see the increasing amount of IoT (Internet of Things) devices being developed and offered to target the “Smart Home.”

In late October of 2016, a domain name service (DNS), host and Internet management company for 80+ major websites experienced several bouts of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks by botnets (short for “robot network”). The end devices were being controlled by a Control Server (CNC Server) not unlike the Droid Control Ships controlling the Droid Armies in Star Wars. The FBI has stated that they do not have any confirmation of a specific group or groups claiming responsibility in the hacker community, but they believe the machines were infected with a variation of the Mirai malware.