Information Technology

For these Black Friday VPN deals, we only considered reputable and trustworthy VPN providers. There are no shortages of VPNs out there, but there is a limited number of companies that provide secure and user-friendly VPNs.Finding true VPN deals can be a bit tricky because the prices change frequently and with various subscription lengths and add-ons, it gets convoluted. Most VPNs charge less for longer subscriptions and the standard price for service is often advertised as a huge discount. But if the VPN is always available for 63% off, then I don’t consider that a sale. For the offers listed in this roundup, I based the discounted price on what I’d consider the standard offer rather than an imaginary inflated price that you’ll never have to pay. Many of these deals include additional months tacked onto a standard plan. These free months drop the average monthly cost but often the upfront price is the same, in those cases we’ve noted that the lump-sum payment hasn’t changed.We didn’t include free VPNs in our roundup because free VPN services are a mixed bag. It takes money to run a VPN and if you’re not paying then you could be bombarded with ads or stuck with a subpar service. That’s in the best-case scenario. The worst free VPNs could make money by selling your data, so it’s best to stick with a paid service if you’re taking your privacy and security seriously. More

Getty Images Password manager 1Password is launching passkey functionality in 2023 and in the meantime has setup a demo for users to test the new passwordless experience. Passkeys use the WebAuthn standard created by the FIDO Alliance and the World Wide Web Consortium, and they serve to replace passwords with cryptographic key pairs — a […] More

Microsoft has outlined several mitigations to protect against attacks on multi-factor authentication that will unfortunately make life more difficult for your remote workers.  Three years ago, attacks on multi-factor authentication (MFA) were so rare that Microsoft didn’t have decent statistics on them, largely because few organisations had enabled MFA.    But with MFA use rising […] More

Image: Asha Barbaschow/ZDNET Hot on the heels of the arrival of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 8.7, Red Hat has released the next version of its RHEL 9 family, RHEL 9.1. Open Source What’s the difference? Why two versions of one enterprise Linux distro? While under the hood there are many specific differences, the big […] More

Image: Getty Images/iStockphoto A joint security alert by CISA and the FBI has warned organizations that haven’t applied much-needed Log4j security patches and mitigations to VMware Horizon server instances to assume their network has been compromised and act accordingly.   It comes following an investigation into a cyberattack, against what they describe as a ‘federal […] More

Jason Cipriani/ZDNET I’ll preface this by saying you should really adopt a true password manager, such as Bitwarden, for this. However, there are a lot of users who can’t add yet another application in the mix to confuse the issue. More how-tos If you’re a MacOS user, you don’t have to toss in a third-party […] More

Image: Getty/Erik Isakson The FBI is warning people to be alert to the threat of technical support scams, in which criminals pose as support staff from computer or software companies and try to trick unsuspecting PC users into giving up access to their bank accounts. The public service announcement by the FBI warns that there have […] More

Image: Getty/Marko Gerber We’re heading into the busiest period for online shopping of the year, as people look for gifts and bargains ahead of the festive season.  And now what was already a busy time for shopping is super-charged by Black Friday and Cyber Monday, the days bookending Thanksgiving weekend, where retailers offer major discounts […] More