The never ending task of paring down my saved chum list brings you this collection of articles related to the Internet and Internet security. Pay attention folks — there’s some good stuff here. Also, remember the key adage: If you get a service for free, you are the product, not the customer.
- Be Alert for Phishing. I’ve always opined that the key risk from the Equifax and other breaches is not identity theft, but phishing. Help Net agrees: they view phishing as a bigger threat than keyloggers or third party breaches. They researched the subject, and noted that “victims of phishing are 400x more likely to be successfully hijacked compared to a random Google user. In comparison, this rate falls to 10x for data breach victims and roughly 40x for keylogger victims. Keyloggers fall in between these extremes, with an odds ratio of roughly 40x”. The reason for this is that phishing kits also actively steal additional authentication factors (secret questions, phone number, device-related information, geolocation data) that can be used to impersonate the victim and bypass protections put in place by email (and other online service) providers.
- So What is Phishing/Spearphishing? Here is a wonderful infographic/cartoon on how to protect yourself from Spearphishing. Along the way, it explains what spearphishing is, how it influenced an election (and potentially gave us President Trump) . It also contains some good tips about how to protect yourself from phishing. Note that, depending on where you work, this may be NSFW.
- Lava Lamps and Security. Entropy. That’s “N”-“Tro”-“Pee”. Say it with me. Entropy is the property of how random your random numbers are. These numbers are usually generated by computers, and depend upon a random seed to start the process. A big issue is: how do you get the seed? Cloudflare does it in a very interesting and analog way: Lava Lamps. A lava lamp is a great way to generate randomness. Cloudflare videotapes its wall of colorful constantly morphing lava lamps and translates that video information into unique cryptographic keys.
- Facebook Privacy. Remember my adage about getting a service for free? One such service is Facebook, and they don’t care about your privacy (and neither does that minx, Wendy). But you care about you, and that’s why you’re going to read this article about how to lock down your privacy settings on Facebook. Yes, you can make it so that when you go out searching for such-and-such for a friend (you know, that NSFW such-and-such), you aren’t suddenly deluged with ads on FB for that product.
- Objectivity of Blog Sites. You’re probably familiar with them: all those blog sites that review this product and that product. Mattress blogs. Makeup blogs. Theatre blogs*. But there’s often a story behind the story about how manufacturers subtly influence them. Remember: if you get a product for free, what are you? Here’s a story I’ve been saving for a while about the Mattress Wars, where a bunch of new mattress stores started a war with mattress bloggers. *This, by the way, is one reason I do not accept free theatre tickets. I choose what I want to see and write about. I follow the ethical model of Consumers Reports. I will pay for tickets what I would have paid through the various discount ticket services I know about.
