Heads up - "Constant Vigilance is the Price of freedom"

[LightOrder]

More bad news I am afraid, Equifax, the credit checking agency has been hacked as well, if you have an account with them it is suggested that you change your password or if you have any dealings with financial organizations [like most of us have ] you may be on their data base so keep an eye on your financial dealings.

[LightOrder]

"Heads up" again Chaps, seems to be a lot of this '****' about this week, there is a 'Ransom Ware' scam coming up to watch out for, as usual I wont post any links here as thats how the bad guys get in.
Suggest watch out for e-mails from or containing 'Herbalife' within, Googe for more info.

[LightOrder]

On a bright note and not to detract from the thrust of the matter:

What do you do if you are attacked by a circus mob?





Go for the juggler. 🤣

[LightOrder]

and an even brighter note: Why does it take pirates so long to learn the alphabet?




Because they spend years at "C". :)

Both these credited to 'Cortana'

[LightOrder]

Netflix scam
Another “pain in the undercarriage” guys, but we all know not to click on links in
e-mails by now, so just one to watch out for.

“Netflix users are receiving phishing emails in their inboxes.

This Netflix scam is convincing. It's easy to get fooled by these phishing emails. The sender of the email is SupportNetflix.
There's a support phone number too.
The fraudulent messages can look official to the untrained eye but they are actually spoofed by cybercriminals.”

Once again it’s out on the web if you really need to know more, as usual no links to click on here for the obvious reason.

[LightOrder]

Hackers Using iCloud's Find My iPhone Feature to Remotely Lock Macs and Demand Ransom Payments

Another one for Apple users (the once 'impregnable' Apple!), hackers have compromised some Apple accounts (likely on non-Apple web sites) passwords have then been used to lock people out of their Macs, see macrumors.com for more info; as usual I WONT paste links on here for the obvious reason.

Suggest two-factor-authentication mechanism or use complex passwords and use a different one for each account to alleviate this.

[LightOrder]

Posting under the banner of ‘Internet security , I thought these web sites and info might help with safety when navigating the Cyber Frontier.

Submit any downloads to virustotal.com which uses 50-odd antivirus packages to check for malware (file size caps at 150MB)

For the more paranoid (or on critical systems) also look for hashes in any downloaded software and validate the hashes against those advertised on the source web site in case anyone's hacked the download file web page.

For websites, VT has a good URL checker but the one on URLVoid.com can also do IP address etc lookups.

These sites are all operated and maintained by security threat researchers who spend their lives doing this kind of stuff.

Also safeweb.norton.com enables you to submit a website’s URL to see if there are any Security issues.

Self-evidently it is NOT appropriate to upload sensitive documents to any Internet web sites!

As you are aware it is normally my policy NOT to post any links here for the obvious reasons, so suggest you Google the above sites for access.

[LightOrder]

Apple Users
If you are on iOS 11 [not sure about iOS 10] the latest security thinking is to disable “Allow Siri when locked”, you can do this in Settings – Siri - Allow Siri when locked, on phones, tablets and pods.
The reason for this is that anyone picking up one of these devices could activate Siri without the passcode and get into all your ‘stuff’, i.e. contacts, files and other Apps.

You are especially vulnerable if you have not calibrated your voice to your device, as any voice could activate Siri.

[jones20]

Apple Users
If you are on iOS 11 [not sure about iOS 10] the latest security thinking is to disable “Allow Siri when locked”, you can do this in Settings – Siri - Allow Siri when locked, on phones, tablets and pods.
The reason for this is that anyone picking up one of these devices could activate Siri without the passcode and get into all your ‘stuff’, i.e. contacts, files and other Apps.



You are especially vulnerable if you have not calibrated your voice to your device, as any voice could activate Siri.

this is highlighted in the new Dan Brown book

[LightOrder]

Good to see Dan is "ahead of the game", I thought this was a recent observation , good stuff!