I am sure you have read some of the recent stories about Prism and what the NSA is storing on each of us in that huge Utah data center. If you are even slightly paranoid, please take a few moments to visit some of your social networks and tighten up your privacy settings. Some of them have moved around (I won’t even get into Facebook here) and some things have changed for the better. This is a short column of tips, and feel free to share your own suggestions as well.

If you use Google for anything, chances are they are storing all sorts of information on you. Click on your picture on the top right, then Privacy, and you can see the numerous settings of what they are allowed to collect. Google Accounts have this Dashboard filled with all sorts of goodies. For example, you can disable location history. There is also a monthly report on your account activity that you cansign up for.

For LinkedIn, go to your picture displayed on the top right, click under review privacy settings, then click on the button on the lower left under “groups, companies and apps” and then click on “Manage settings for LinkedIn plugins on third-party sites” where you should not allow LinkedIn to get information from its plug-ins. While you are mucking about in LinkedIn, you might also want to take a gander at the apps that your have authorized and prune them a bit. LinkedIn has recently reworked its third-party apps so you should see far fewer of them here than before. You also should revisit what else you share when you move around the LinkedIn network: this is under Profile, what others can see when you click on their profile.

If you haven’t been to these screens in a while it is worth spending a few moments clicking around on some of the other options.

One concern that I have is when I post things from my iPhone or iPad I don’t want to always reveal my location. Go to Settings, then Privacy, then disable location services for the specific apps that you don’t want to provide this information, such as your camera (so your photos aren’t geotagged) and any other social networks that you want to keep your movements private.

Finally, for improved Twitter privacy, go to Settings, Account, Personalization, check the box to turn on do not track feature. While you are here, you also might want to head over to view your authorized apps and revoke access of any that you might no longer be using.

Each week I curate my favorite security news stories culled from the leading trade journals and sites for my Dice Security talent community page.

• Attackers’ Toolbox Makes Malware Detection More Difficult
• Botnet Guesses Weak Passwords to Compromise Thousands of Web Servers
• Google boosts flaw bounties to $5,000 on Chromium program
• Can Kim Dotcom rescue secure email?
• eBay troll and fraudster is unmasked
• Survival of the Fittest: New York Times Attackers Evolve Quickly
• BIND Vulnerability Enables DNS Cache Poisoning Attack
• TIME and again: an SSL breach before BREACH
• Security 101: SMShing

Here are my favorite security stories of the past week, as posted on Dice’s security talent community that I curate.

• ‘Fort Disco’ Botnet Behind Attack Campaign Against Thousands Of Sites
• Twitter Gives Two-Factor Security a Second Shot
• Linux ‘Hand of Thief’ Trojan offered for sale at $2,000 a time
• Organizations ignore social media when it comes to business continuity planning
• California escrow firm shuttered after cyberthieves drained it of $1.5 million
• Breaking Down the China Chopper Web Shell
• Mixed Content Blocking Appears in Firefox 23
• Thoughts on the FBI’s Preso at Black Hat
• Bitcoin Miners Use AutoIt-Complied Programs With Anti-analysis Code
• TSA, change the airport security mindset
  

Here is the current list of my favorite security stories of the past week, curated for the Dice Security Talent Community.

• Cheap Monitoring Highlights Dangers Of Internet Of Things
• Kroll-Ontrack Rescues Data From RAID 5 Disks After Server Failure
• Bogus Chrome, Firefox extensions pilfer social media accounts
• Shorter, higher-speed DDoS attacks on the rise, Arbor Networks says
• Banks let e-criminals pinch gobs of money underneath the law’s nose
• New Software Obfuscation Throws Wrench into Reverse Engineering
• What Can Happen On Your Watch? Exposing the SDLC Myth
• Syrian Electronic Army Hacks Major Communications Websites
• 2013 Browser Security Comparative Analysis: Phishing Protection
• Texas students fake GPS signals and take control of an $80 million yacht

My top nine security stories of the week that I have posted to my Dice Security Community.

• SIM Card Hack A Wakeup Call
• Black Hat: Don’t Blindly Trust Vulnerability Data
• SEC charges Texas man with running Bitcoin Ponzi scheme
• Cisco-Sourcefire union raises many product overlap questions
• Lakeland hacked and passwords reset, customers advised to change passwords elsewhere
• Why Taking the Apple Developer Sites Down was a Good Thing
• Tumblr Fixes Password-Sniffing Bug on iPad, iPhone
• How the FISA Court Undermines Trust
• What are the odds of a Snowden getaway?

Here are links to my top ten stories that I post on Dice’s Security Community.

• WordPress, Other CMS Platforms Give Attackers Room For Creativity
• Market for Fake Social Network Accounts Still Booming
• Broala commercializes open-source IPS
• Citrix edges VMware, Microsoft in VDI face-off
• Hollywood hospital fires six for snooping into patient records
• The Ghost of Yahoo! Accounts Past
• College Student Gets Year in Prison for Election Fraud
• Patch Management: The Proactive Approach
• Security Risk of Display Images in a Gmail Email
• Why One Employee Is Your Greatest Security Threat

Recent updates to my Dice Security Community page of worthwhile links, including the past week’s best security stories:

1. Google Android Vs. Apple iOS: The Mobile App Privacy War
2. MIT Immersion Project Reveals What NSA’s PRISM Program Knows
3. Privacy group sues UK government over surveillance programs
4. 10 Hot Security Startups to Watch
5. Anatomy of Cryptocat’s pseudorandom number generator
6. Google Sets New ‘Aggressive’ 7-Day Deadline For Vendors To Reveal Or Fix Zero-Day Bugs Under Attack
7. Critical TrueType Font Parsing Vulnerabilities Addressed in Patch Tuesday Updates
8. We interrupt this program to warn the Emergency Alert System is hackable
9. I am ‘Datarmined’ to secure my Facebook posts
10. Shooting the messenger

This week I am in Detroit, learning about what Ford is doing to improve their cars. In the meantime, here are my top ten stories about network security from the trades:

1: South Korean Universities Targeted By Chinese-Speaking Hackers

2: Android Devices Become New Target of Ransomware Scams

3: Gartner: ‘Containerisation’ is not a BYOD panacea

4: Source code for Carberp financial malware gets leaked online

5: Taking a closer look at the Glazunov exploit kit

6: How to Avoid Digital Life Doom with Facebook Graph Search

7: Google Mine Wants To Track Your Stuff

8: How to build your first Firefox OS Cracking App

9: World of Warcraft mobile auctions closed after rash of account hijacks

10: Mobile Malware Plays Hide and Seek

You can find links to other security stories, training classes, job openings and articles of interest on the Dice Security Talent Community that I curate each week here.