Category: Warning

How to Stay Safe on Public WI-FI

The first piece of advice is to avoid public Wi-Fi completely.

A public Wi-Fi network is inherently less secure than your home or office Wi-Fi because it is publicly available.

If you do need to use public Wi-Fi then pick one which needs a password and do not carry out any financial activity or buy anything or access your email or do anything else needing passwords.

If you want to be secure when using public Wi-Fi you will need a VPN (Virtual Private Network) installed on your devices.  These encrypt all communications between your devices and their target websites etc.

They also let you browse websites without anyone being able to track your location and activities.

Alternatively you can take your own Wi-Fi with you by using your mobile phone to create a Wi-Fi hotspot for your devices.

Points to Remember

  1. Leave Wi-Fi turned off until you need it.

When you’re finished working online, turn it off again.

  1. Turn Off File Sharing

If you have file sharing of any kind enabled then turn it off while on public Wi-Fi as it could be copying your confidential information to the Internet unencrypted.

  1. Keep Your Antivirus and Antimalware Up to Date

You must have anti-virus and ant-malware installed and make sure to keep them up to date or their effectiveness will diminish.

  1. Use https Websites where Possible

Https access is safer than http access so stick to those websites that have https versions where possible.

  1. Don’t Leave Your Devices Unattended in Public

You don’t want some accessing your laptop, smart phone or other device. Even if they don’t steal it, they may access your information or install a malicious APP

Stay Safe.

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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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The Parisian Gold Ring Scam

 

Paris is a beautiful city and generally it’s a very safe city to visit.

But it does have some notorious scams that regularly happen to tourists.

 

 

You’re walking along noticing the sights and see someone apparently pick up something from the ground.

They seem to have a ring and they come over to you and show their good fortune as they’ve just found a gold ring on the ground.

They ask if it’s yours.

“Non”.

Then they offer to sell it to you for maybe 50 Euros.

If you’re not interested then the price drops and keeps dropping as they will probably agree to just 10 Euros for the ring.

But even that is a bad deal as the ring is just cheap metal with gold colouring.

Don’t pay these scammers anything.

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

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The Impact of Cyber Attacks on Business

The impact of cyber-attacks can be bruising for a business with both short and long term effects to consider.

A 2016 survey of 428 businesses that have suffered cyber-attacks in the previous months.

You can see from the statistics above for 2016, that the biggest impact reported by businesses that have suffered from cyber-attacks is the provision of new measures to prevent further attacks. This can be costly but is essential to protect against further attacks.

There are the short term issues:-

  • Bringing in expert technical staff to find out how the attack happened
  • Technical expertise needed to start to build defences against further such attacks
  • Extra staff to deal with recovery, communications with customers, legal ramifications etc.
  • Disruption to staff and service to customers

Then there are the long term effects:-

  • Reputation damage
  • Steps needed to restore reputation and customer confidence
  • Share price

It is better to build strong defences against cyber-attacks than simply trust to luck.

It is prudent to have plans in place for how to deal with such attacks as the FBI now say that it’s not a question of whether any organisation will be attacked, but simply when.

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The SIM Swap Scam

If you access a website and have forgotten the password, there is usually a link labeled ‘Forgot Your Password’ or similar and if you click the link they will send you a password reset request by email.  You click the reset request in the email message and reset your password.

Now, if scammers can get hold of such an email message, then they can reset your password and lock you out of your own account and you will have great difficulty getting your account back.

This situation is becoming more dangerous as many people and businesses rely on mobile phones for proof of identity. e.g. your bank may send you security numbers to type into your account to prove your ID but if scammers can access your phone and read your messages, they are in control.

The SIM Card Swap

Unless you have leave sufficient information openly online for scammers to break your password, then their usual approach is called social engineering.

This means to take advantage of people’s trust. So they will research your information online and use what they find to convince a mobile phone shop worker (or customer service worker) to cancel your current SIM card (I lost it) and activate a new one.

They will then have access to your messages, contacts list etc.

Then they try to access your bank account and shopping accounts.

Prevention

To be safe, you need to limit the amount of personal information that is available about you online. Anything you make public can be read by criminal’s intent on defrauding you or stealing your identity.

Text messages are very useful, but remember that they are not encrypted and can potentially be read by anyone.

You can use APPS that encrypt the data such as iMessage, WhatsApp, Signal, etc. for anything that must be kept private.

If there is any suspicious activity on your account or you receive suspicious calls, then contact your bank or phone company.

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