Stories by Roger A. Grimes

To root out persistent hackers, sometimes you have to get a little creative

The proliferation of insecure devices in every facet of our lives will have consequences far beyond the digital realm

Like it or not, your PC is susceptible to malware. These videos will teach you how to locate the bad stuff, then remove it from your system

From secure chips to anonymity services, here’s how to stay safe and private on the web

Here’s how to find out if your child is involved in malicious online activity -- before the authorities do

You're far more vulnerable to hackers than you think. Here are the secrets to staying secure

How to scan every running process on your system for malware in seconds, without installing antimalware software

Forget Nigerian princes -- today’s spearphishing is sophisticated business, fooling even the most seasoned security pros

The default state of Internet privacy is a travesty. But if you're willing to work hard, you can experience the next best thing to absolute Internet anonymity

In the 10 years since Security Adviser debuted, the threats have changed -- as have the defenses, and no one can argue computer security is safer overall

Any device with a computer chip can be hacked, but not all hacks are created equal. In fact, in a world where tens of millions of computers are compromised by malware every year and nearly every company's network is owned, truly innovative or thought-provoking hacks are few and far between.

Nearly every company in the world has thousands of vulnerabilities that hackers can easily exploit. For anyone working in IT, this is not a bombshell announcement. It's business as usual.

For all the emphasis on tools and gizmos, IT is still very much about the people who develop and use said tools and gizmos. Collaboration, mutual respect, passion for the work -- all this and more are essential to a beneficial outcome, whether your IT group is shipping code, swatting bugs, working with business users, or securing company systems.

Getting fired from an IT security job is a rare event, but there are certainly ways to ensure or accelerate your own unemployment. I'm not talking about garden-variety mistakes here. After all, most IT workers create or live with lots of little mistakes every day. That's the nature of complex, rewarding work.

Nine years ago, I created what I believe was the world's first USB worm. By playing around with a USB thumb drive and placing a hidden file on it, I was able to make any computer in which the "infected" USB drive was plugged into automatically spread the file to the host computer, then back again when a new USB device was plugged in.