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Phishing Message Targets

What are the targets for phishing messages?

Phishing is where scammers send messages by email, text or phone pretending to be from someone you are likely to trust e.g. your bank, British Gas, Microsoft, your Internet provider, local government HMRC etc.

Basically, they do this in order to get information from you – personal information that can be sold to scammers, spammers and identity thieves.  That includes email addresses, phone number, payment card details, bank account details, date of birth etc.,

 

Proofpoint’s 2017 Human Factor Report, shows that a quarter of all phishing scams target Apple IDs (i.e. login and password)

TARGET Percentage of Phishing Messages
Apple 25%
Microsoft 17%
Google Drive 12.9%
USAA 12.4%
Paypal 10.6%
Adobe 5.8%
Dropbox 4.8%
Blackboard 4.7%
LinkedIn 4.5%
CapitalOne 2.2%

According to the survey, Scammers seem to have the most success when phishing with Dropbox as that gets far more clicks (13%) than say phishing for Apple (1%)

The fact that fake invoices are used in 26% of phishing scams is not surprising as it is the most popular phishing technique aimed at businesses.

The next most common approaches are:-  malware infected file attachments, mail delivery failure messages, fake orders and fake payments.

If you have any experiences with scammers, spammers or time-waster do let me know, by email.

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Warning – Web Coin Mining on Your PC

For normal physical currencies, each country has an appointed currency maker – such as The Royal Mint in the UK that makes currency for the UK and several other counties. But with cyber currencies – who makes it and how?

The creation of new coins is called “mining” and involves large amounts of computer processing and this increases as more currency is created. For Bitcoin, the effort involved in making new currency means very few can manage it.

But, if you could somehow spread that computer processing demand out among thousands or even millions — of unknowing user’s computers, it would make mining a lot cheaper and possibly quicker.

This is exactly what some websites are doing. They use your CPU to mine cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin without your knowledge.

This can happen to you simply from visiting a website that uses JavaScript to start using your CPU for processing.

There are other methods but this is the most common and can be avoided if your browser has JavaScript disabled – but that will also block the functionality on some popular websites.

How to know if this has happened to your computer?

It’s not easy to identify unless your PC is suddenly very very slow and the CPU seems extremely busy while doing nothing.

Some websites can quietly use your CPU to mine cryptocurrency and they limit they effect on your work so you wouldn’t know unless you went out of your way to find out.

On a windows PC you can press CTRL, ALT and DELETE at the same time then select Task manager and see the CPU utilisation levels.

But if in doubt, the easiest remedy is to reboot your computer.

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Just How Big is Facebook

Worldwide, there are over 2.20 billion monthly active Facebook users and that number is still growing across the world.

There are 1.45 billion mobile users that login on average every day and the corresponding figure for monthly users is 1.74 billion. Both of the numbers are growing steadily.

In Europe, over 307 million people are on Facebook.

People aged 25 to 34 are the biggest group of Facebook users but there is evidence that younger people are moving away from Facebook (considered to be uncool now that so many Grandfathers and Grandmothers inhabit Facebook).

Some oddities:-

  • Highest traffic occurs mid-week between 1 to 3 pm.
  • a Facebook post at 7pm will result in more clicks on average than posting at 8pm
  • On Thursdays and Fridays, engagement is 18% higher than other days
  • There are estimated to be 83 million fake profiles
  • 300 million photos are uploaded each day
  • Average time spent per Facebook visit is 20 minutes.
  • 50% of 18-24 year-olds go on Facebook when they wake up.

Like it or loathe it, Facebook is the 800 pound Gorilla in the social media world and will do everything it can to stay at the top.

Interesting that it is considered to be uncool by a growing number of young people so maybe its peak is near and it could fall from grace as quickly as it rose.

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Delisting on Google

In May 2014, the European Court of Justice established the “right to be forgotten,” i.e. the “right to delist,” allowing Europeans to ask search engines to delist information about themselves from search results.

Google must consider if the information in question is “inaccurate, inadequate, irrelevant or excessive”—and whether there is a public interest in the information remaining available in search results.

Understanding how Google make these types of decisions—and how people are using new rights like those granted by the European Court—is important. Since 2014, Google have provided information about “right to be forgotten” delisting requests plus anonymized examples of some of the requests Google have received

Between 2014 and 2017, there have been 665,612 requests to delist covering 2,470,351 URLs.  Roughly 43% of requests to delist have been enacted and the rest refused as not complying with the guidelines for delisting.

Evaluating Requests

Google assess each request on a case-by-case basis. In some cases, Google may ask the individual for more information. After a request is submitted to Google it undergoes a manual review and once a decision has been reached, the individual will receive an email notifying him or her of the decision and, if Google do not delist the URL, a brief explanation.

Reasons Google Don’t Delist

A few common material factors involved in decisions not to delist pages include:-

  • the existence of alternative solutions
  • technical reasons
  • duplicate URLs

Google may also determine that the page contains information which is strongly in the public interest. Determining whether content is in the public interest is complex and may mean considering many diverse factors, including—but not limited to—whether the content relates to the requester’s professional life, a past crime, political office, position in public life, or whether the content is self-authored content, consists of government documents, or is journalistic in nature.

Google also publish some of the requests in an anonymized manner to allow debate and comment on whether delisting should occur in each example.

Example Request 1: Google received a request from the Austrian Data Protection Authority on behalf of an Austrian businessman and former politician to delist 22 URLs, including reputable news sources and a government record, from Google Search.

Outcome: We did not delist the URLs given his former status as a public figure, his position of prominence in his current profession, and the nature of the URLs in question.

Example Request 2: Google received a request from an individual to delist several URLs from Google Search about his election as leader of a political movement and other political positions he held when he was a minor.

Outcome: Google delisted 13 URLs as he did not appear to be currently engaged in political life and was a minor at the time. Google did not delist 1 URL as the page referred to a different person who had the same name as the requester.

Example Request 3: Google received a court order directed to Google Inc. to delist from Google Search a blog post about a professional who was convicted for threatening people with a weapon on a city street.

Outcome: Google appealed the decision, but lost the appeal. Google delisted the blog post.

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