Hopefully, the first cyber-attack that MacKenzie Brown helps you survive will be a fake one. Otherwise you’ll end up calling her and her colleagues at Optiv Security when you’ve already been compromised by a hack.

As an incident response consultant, Brown helps clients prepare for, or recover from, intrusions from hackers. And as the founder of the non-profit Ms. GreyHat, Brown provides training and networking for girls and women studying and practicing cybersecurity. We talked to her about her infosec work and her best security advice.

My wife and are I about to have a baby, which is great! But as most new parents quickly learn, modern babies seem to need a lot of accessories - crib, changing surface, diapers, car seat, stroller, and, of course, a baby monitor (among many other things).

Not everyone wants an always-on microphone in their home, no matter how cool it is to control your light bulbs with your voice. If you're buying gifts for someone who gets nervous about this brave new world with everything listening to us, showering them with a few of these privacy-friendly gifts might help them relax and enjoy the little things in life.

Like targeted ads, or unmarked cars waiting just around the corner.

This weekend The Wall Street Journal ran a story running down a number of different ways you can fix your family’s tech problems for free this holidays season. There are a ton of good ideas on the list, but one section that caught my attention was the section on privacy and security.

My family is great at calling me and asking basic questions about how to operate their smartphones or “fix” Netflix, but they never ask questions about privacy and security — and they should.

You'd think that weapons capable of great destruction and, if misused, could even trigger a War Games-style game of thermonuclear war would be secured by some of the tightest security imaginable. But it turns out that while there's no secret backdoor using the password Joshua, the US' ballistic missiles aren't protected by security measures most would consider standard. So, we present you with five things you can do to be more secure than the US missile defence systems.

Marriott International announced Friday that personal information for up to 500 million of its guests may have been accessed as part of a breach to its Starwood guest reservation database. If you’ve stayed at a Marriott hotel in the past few years, this probably means you.

It's almost a dead-set certainty that anyone contemplating and successfully embarking in a career in cybersecurity today can be assured of a long and lucrative work life. While the numbers from different reports don't always match, information security professionals are in short supply across the world. So, what does it take to kick start a career in cybersecurity?

All of us are vulnerable to being hacked. But how can you keep your information (and money) safe? What steps should you take to protect yourself? To find out, we brought in Hector Monsegur, former black-hat hacker, now Director of Assessment Services at Rhino Labs — and one of our favourite guests from the past year.

He tells us what companies should do to keep us safe(r), what we should look out for after an attack, and how we can prevent hacks from causing too much damage.

The IT sector is in the midst off a massive skills shortage and once of the areas that this is most acutely felt in is cybersecurity. Businesses, large and small, as well as government departments and not-for-profit companies are all under increased threat of cyberattack. And that means they are all looking for people to help protect and support their companies. So what does it take to kick start a career in cyber security?

Do you have any idea whether you’re “safe” online? Online security and privacy are complicated, and risks vary by person: You might worry about getting harassed, hacked, or your boss finding your terrible old blog posts and using them as an excuse to fire you. Crash Override’s Automated Cybersecurity Helper helps you secure your accounts according to your needs, and it guides you one step at a time so you don’t get overwhelmed.

Ever since the Facebook/Cambridge Analytica bombshell, online privacy has been on all of our minds. But it isn’t just Facebook that’s tracking you. From other tech giants to most store rewards credit cards, countless companies deploy similar tactics — even your favourite (or hated) forum site, Reddit.

Almost every service you use on the web that involves a username and password is in some ways collecting information about you. In some cases, that info might just be your email and a few identifying data points like your age or gender. In others, (*cough* Facebook) you're handing over information about your likes and dislikes, who your friends are, and even where you go during the day.

Firefox has started rolling out two-factor authentication, and if you use the browser to store any passwords you should enable it now.

Maybe you've heard someone mention GDPR in passing, but were too embarrassed to ask what those letters actually stood for. Or maybe your friend posted something online about what GDPR means for online data protection. At the very least, you've probably received a few dozen emails from various companies about how their updated their privacy policies comply with the new law.

We talk a lot about software designed to attack our smartphones and computers, but it turns out your router might also be at risk. That's right. Some dangerous new malware is going after the box you use to beam internet around your home or office.

When it comes to messaging apps, Signal is one of the most secure options around, but it turns out the service actually has a pretty big vulnerability if you're using it on a Mac.

Google Chrome comes with its own built-in security measures to warn you about dangerous websites and weed out phishing scams, but it never hurts to have more (or better) safeguards when you're browsing.

Cybersecurity company Endgame , which provides security solutions for preventing attacks and detecting threats, has released a large data set that can be used for training AI-based security systems. In a research paper they recently published, Endgame's Hyrum S Anderson and Phil Roth describe EMBER - a "benchmark dataset for training machine learning models to statically detect malicious Windows portable executable files".

If the last few weeks of Facebook scandals have revealed anything, it's that the social network already knows way too much about us. But in case you needed another reason to stop giving Facebook your personal info here's a good one: it could get your online accounts hacked.