What is Jesus Oil?

There are a variety of scams claiming secret knowledge from the Bible to heal ailments and one of the most common is “Jesus Oil” or “The Oil of God”..

The emails claim that Jesus used a special type of cannabis oil, known as Kaneh-bosm, to cure various debilitating illnesses.

There isn’t really any secret in this as for thousands of years people all over the world have used plant based medicines including sometimes extracting oil to make a more concentred form of the medicine. This process is far more advanced nowadays but essential oils are still extracted by the same though more sophisticated  version of the method.

These oils and their various chemical components have been known to science for a long time and some are the active ingredients in modern medicine. Some are anti-bacterial such as Cypress and such are inflammatory or pain relievers such as Frankincense and Juniper and so on.

What the scammers are actually selling is  either their own poor quality version of the medicinal oils or often nothing – you pay and receive nothing.

Before buying any such products – do always check on their effectiveness and don’t be swayed by claims of Godlike powers, Jesus or other religious connections.

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How Come Celebrities Stay So Skinny?

“One of the country’s top addiction specialists just shared a shocking secret with the public”.

That’s the tagline to get you interested in the scam email.

It goes on about a single hormone causing addiction, but that no-one ever talks about.

“This secret has nothing to do with drugs”.

“And while no-one in weight loss ever talks about it”.

This is just the scammer’s fantasy.

Then the sales pitch is that a specialist has found a way to silence the craving hormone, leading to some “shocking” results e.g. a woman who lost 52 pounds.

The scammer invoked the idea of celebrities in the email title so goes on to state that celebrities learn this secret by paying tens of thousands of dollars – but you can know it now by clicking the link below.

It’s all rubbish of course – there are endless fat celebrities even though the industry of celebrity tries to push them to be skinny and those that are skinny typically make money by publishing their diet tips etc.

Just another pathetic scammer.

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Project Zero at Google

Project Zero is the name of a team of security analysts employed by Google, tasked with finding zero-day vulnerabilities in commercial software. This means bugs in other people’s software that can lead to security problems. They have no interest in everyday bugs that affect people’s work but not security.

After finding a number of flaws in software used by many end-users while researching other problems, Google decided to form a full-time team dedicated to finding such vulnerabilities, not only in Google software but any software used by its users. It’s establishment fits into the larger trend of Google’s counter-surveillance initiatives in the wake of the 2013 global surveillance disclosures by Edward Snowden.

Responsible Disclosure

When serious security bugs are found in software, should the world be informed or just the software maker?

Bugs found by the Project Zero team are reported to the manufacturer and only made publicly visible once a patch has been released or if 90 days have passed without a patch being released.

This is Google’s way of implementing responsible disclosure, giving software companies 90 days to fix a problem before informing the public so that users themselves can take necessary steps to avoid attacks.

Notable Discoveries

On 30 September 2014 Google detected a security flaw within Windows 8.1 which allows a normal user to gain administrative access. Microsoft was notified of the problem immediately but did not fix the problem within 90 days, so the information about the bug was made publicly available on 29 December 2014. Releasing the bug to the public brought a response from Microsoft that they were working on the problem.

On 19 February 2017 Google discovered a flaw within Cloudflare, which caused their edge servers to run past the end of a buffer and return memory that contained private information such as HTTP cookies, authentication tokens, HTTP POST bodies, and other sensitive data.

On 27 March 2017 Project Zero discovered a vulnerability in the popular password manager LastPass and four days later LastPass announced they had fixed the problem.

Project Zero was involved in discovering the Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities affecting many modern CPUs, which were discovered in mid-2017 and disclosed in early January 2018.

Keep up the good work!

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Scammers Make Their Offer Irresistible

Scammers use a set of psychological tricks to make you trust whatever they are offering.

These’ ‘tricks’ are well-known and used by Marketers and many others.

These include

  1. Create a sense of legitimacy
    • Lists of references from satisfied customers
    • ‘Professional’ reviews of the product or service
    • Celebrity endorsements
    • Ride on the back of well respected products
  2. Invoke emotion
    • Create excitement around a new release or a ‘first’ of some kind
    • Create fear about missing out on the product or service
    • Create worry about regretting not taking the opportunity
    • Create anger that the product has been kept hidden away from the public until now
  3. Create a sense of urgency
    • Fake deadline
    • Only a limited number/amount of the product remains
    • Be the first to get this product or service
  4. Use social influence
    • Happy references from members of the public
    • 100,000 people have tried this and recommend it

 

Do think about how the scammer’s message affects you before making any decisions. This also applies to whenever someone is trying to sell you something  or to get you to do something and always applies to unsolicited emails, texts and calls.

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Are Data Breaches Common

The Proportion of Businesses That Have Had Breaches in one year

  Overall Micro Firms Small Firms Medium Firms Large Firms Admin/ Real Estate
% experiencing a cyber security breach or attack 24 17 33 51 65 39

 

Businesses that invest more in cyber security have more breaches than businesses that invest less. This may seem counter intuitive but it’s partly due to businesses that realise they are more at risk such as financial companies who then invest more. However, businesses where the online presence is minimal feel less at risk and invest less.

There is also the assumption that businesses that invest more in cyber security will be better at identifying such breaches.

Types of Breaches/Attacks

Viruses, spyware or malware 68%
Other impersonating organisation in emails or online 32%
Denial of service attacks 15%
Hacking 13%
Money stolen electronically 13%
Breaches from personally owned devices 8
Personal information stolen 8
Breaches from externally hosted web services 8
Unlicensed or stolen software downloaded 8
Money stolen via fraud emails or websites 6
Software damaged or stolen 5
Breaches on social media 3
Intellectual property theft 1

 

You can see that attacks of various kinds are very common. All businesses must take steps to protect against data breaches and all common forms of cyber-attack

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