Computer viruses are pretty serious threats, and can cause huge expensive issues for businesses. Many cases of malware and computer viruses actually use your computer to commit real crimes. The FBI states that hundreds of thousands of people will likely lose the ability to surf the web if they have a particular piece of malware.

This has been a pretty common topic for us on the LTS blog. We've seen a lot of Chicago Metro Area clients and customers suffer the consequences when online retailers and other account providers experience a security breach. It is equally vital for consumers to know what to do in the event of a security breach as it is the company that is actually breached.

This month Google announced that their search results will now contain personal results from friends and connections made in Google+. Twitter, the real-time searchable social network, publicly announced that they thought this was not a good idea. Will personalizing search results make for a better Google experience or will it hurt? Let's take a look.

Computer viruses and malware have been around for a long time, and cybercriminals have always tried to package their malevolent doings under a veil of deception. One method that has been in place for a while now is called scareware. Often disguised as something that appears to want to help your computer, scareware will scam users into paying for a service that isn't beneficial.

You've probably seen these funny barcode-like symbols popping up and wondered if they mean anything. These days they are all over the place - on websites, in magazines, and even in television ads. What are these mysterious glyphs? Should we be concerned? And of course the question on all of our minds, how can I use them to market my business?

Despite a quivering global economy, people have been spending a lot of money on gifts this holiday season, and much of that is online. In a comparison between this year and last, U.S. consumers have spent $32 billion dollars online, a 15% increase from last year.

Foursquare is a social network of sorts that works like a marketing game. Users run Foursquare on their mobile phones. It uses GPS to pinpoint your location and pulls up stores, restaurants, and other public locations and venues in your vicinity. You can then 'check in' to the place you are at, and it will share it with your friends. It's a service that promotes word-of-mouth marketing!

Despite the increasingly vast trust we put into the Internet to keep our personal and business information safe and secure, many users take their passwords very lightly. In an analysis studying over 32 million passwords from RockYou, a company that develops software for social networks, it's been discovered just how little effort is put in to keep things secure. The results are shocking.