PROTECT YOUR PRIVACY
Whether it’s pesky nation states taking an interest in Auntie Ethel’s dark web browsing, ad networks tracking users’ daily surfing routines or hackers in Eastern Europe hijacking Amazon accounts and ordering bulk confectioneries, there’s plenty to be wary of online.
With so much of our lives lived online, if systems are compromised or credentials fall into the wrong hands then things can get ugly pretty quickly. Most banks will act quickly to cancel cards when fraudulent transactions are detected, and generally they will provide refunds, though the process is tedious. But there are other risks as well, chief among them is identity theft. Convincing someone that the person that’s claiming to be you was not, in fact, you but this person talking to them now is very definitely, absolutely you, can be tricky.
The effects were presciently and amusingly illustrated in the movie Hackers(where a Secret Service agent sees his credit rating destroyed, unfortunate personal adverts taken out in his name and eventually him being declared deceased), but the reality can be devastating. Unless you’re prepared to go off-grid there’s no way to defend against a determined and well-equipped adversary. Fortunately, there are steps to thwart the more common attacks without requiring you to don the old tinfoil tricorn. Read on, stay safe.
By now most people are aware of the old adage, ‘if something sounds too good to be true, then it probably is’ and, thankfully, the once common ‘419 emails’ purportedly from executors of recently deceased Nigerian princes offering riches in exchange for a small fee are becoming less prevalent. But phishing and social engineering attacks have evolved and represent a very real, probably even the largest, threat to online security.
The miscreants who indulge in it have a battery of tools at their disposal. A common type of phishing attack is to send potential marks an email which appears to come from their bank. It’s trivially easy to copy the styles, wording and address information from an official bank email, and easy enough to register a domain name that looks something like the official domain (think replacing letter ‘o’ with number zero, or using a ‘.co’ domain instead of ‘.com.au’) from which to send the email. This email might say something like ‘following a security review, <meaningless jargon>, you need to log in here and update
