A couple of our recent posts have covered how to keep your login information secure and how to secure your local environment. In the latter we briefly mentioned how important it was to browse the web safely. Malicious content being served from a website is by far one of the biggest and most common threats to the security of your computer. The best advice that I can offer concerning safe web browsing is simple: trust nothing.

It should come as no surprise that browsing unsavory websites, such as those containing adult or pirated content, comes with risks of infecting your computer. Unfortunately this same potential exists with every single website out there. Some might think that since they are visiting a reputable company’s website that it is safe and that is not the case. Back in February NBC’s website was compromised and ended up serving malicious content to users. Just this past August the New York Times’ DNS was hijacked leaving near endless possibilities for attackers to abuse. Again my advice on handling this would be to trust nothing. Continue reading →