Man, Sometimes This Stuff Is Just Weird...

[Jud]

24 minutes ago, Samuel T Cogley said:

 

And vulnerabilities are often exploited not by bots hammering your firewall, but by phish emails that compromise your network from the inside, then leverage known exploits.  Bots not only attempt to beat down your firewall, they also are spamming you 24/7/365.

 

And all your friends.  I now regularly receive spam from two relatives and one friend from work (that they didn't send, but their computers did). Do relatives or close friends have reminders for your birthday, your address, or other information identifying you on their devices or computers?

.

Going from retail to wholesale, how many of you did *not* have personal identifying information with Experian (the credit reporting agency), Target, or other owners of huge information databases that have been hacked?

[Paul R]

3 hours ago, Jud said:

 

And all your friends.  I now regularly receive spam from two relatives and one friend from work (that they didn't send, but their computers did). Do relatives or close friends have reminders for your birthday, your address, or other information identifying you on their devices or computers?

.

Going from retail to wholesale, how many of you did *not* have personal identifying information with Experian (the credit reporting agency), Target, or other owners of huge information databases that have been hacked?

 

I would venture it is a totally safe bet everyone reading this got burned by at least one of those, and probably more than one. Experian, Target, Home Depot, the Veterans Administration... and on and on. 

 

Which is why it is so important to be sure the network behind your firewall has something looking at it to detect weird shit. It is more difficult than just defending the barrier, but yeah - one little innocent email and --- zinnggg! Life sucks. 

 

Do you know how many VPNs are coming out of your network? And if you do, do you know what each one is sending? Not only your phones, but printers, scanners, music servers, and for heavens sake, Armor is identifying our microwave as a potential issue. It isn't, but only because it's IP address is not allowed to originate communications outside the local net. It constantly tries to connect to Amazon. Hey Alexa - stop trying to reorder popcorn for me!

 

-Paul 

 

[BrokeLinuxPhile]

I would not be surprised if our kitchen stove is a giant security hole, it has bluetooth.  Smart TV isn't the most secure thing either, and damn is that thing chatty.  Wife's work laptop blasts away as well, but I just filter out her work apps from doing anything on the LAN.  I've done this professionally and it can still be a chore keeping the homestead net secure and clutter free.

[AudioDoctor]

11 hours ago, daverich4 said:

 

Maybe to get access to your email? Pretty much anyone will send a reset password link to your email. Your broker, your bank, your?

 

Everything else has 2FA authentication as well as alerts immediately upon an email being sent to reset a password.  Heck, even this website has 2FA enabled.

 

My email consists of fundraising emails from every single politician on the planet, you want them just ask, I'll forward them all to you... 😉

[AudioDoctor]

4 hours ago, Paul R said:

Which is why it is so important to be sure the network behind your firewall has something looking at it to detect weird shit.

 

Little Snitch

Orbi Armor

Ad Blockers, Ghostery in my case because Safari Tech Preview has stopped all browser add-ons that didn't come from their own App Store.

1Password to create completely random strings of letters/numbers/characters

2FA on everything possible

Encrypted drives

Firmware password

VPN on my phone

User account passwords on Computer

 

Maybe something I am missing but those are all the steps I take to remain secure on my computers/network/phone.

[AudioDoctor]

8 hours ago, Jud said:

Going from retail to wholesale, how many of you did *not* have personal identifying information with Experian (the credit reporting agency), Target, or other owners of huge information databases that have been hacked?

 

1Password monitors for breaches with your info in it, and alerts you so you can change the password immediately.

 

edit: SO does one of the credit monitoring and identity theft monitoring things, I can't remember who it is because it's been a while since I have received an email from them about an extremely old email password that was in a hack someplace.

[Jud]

5 hours ago, AudioDoctor said:

 

1Password monitors for breaches with your info in it, and alerts you so you can change the password immediately.

 

edit: SO does one of the credit monitoring and identity theft monitoring things, I can't remember who it is because it's been a while since I have received an email from them about an extremely old email password that was in a hack someplace.

 

My info was in the Experian thing, and they had to pay for monitoring. Changed an email password as a result.

[daverich4]

7 hours ago, AudioDoctor said:

 

Everything else has 2FA authentication as well as alerts immediately upon an email being sent to reset a password.  Heck, even this website has 2FA enabled.

 

My email consists of fundraising emails from every single politician on the planet, you want them just ask, I'll forward them all to you... 😉

 

I run Mojave on my Mac. Recently I started getting pop ups when using 2FA that you just click on to put the code into the right spot. My computer is password protected but if it’s open, 2FA doesn’t mean anything. I can fix that by turning off text messages on that computer which is too bad because that’s a convenient way to do them. 

[AudioDoctor]

7 hours ago, daverich4 said:

 

I run Mojave on my Mac. Recently I started getting pop ups when using 2FA that you just click on to put the code into the right spot. My computer is password protected but if it’s open, 2FA doesn’t mean anything. I can fix that by turning off text messages on that computer which is too bad because that’s a convenient way to do them. 

 

Yeah, but that happens when you are physically here and signed into your computer. Put a password on it, geez.

 

Edit: Also, if I can I use an Authenticator app rather than a text message. I read an article that made a good argument for the app being more secure. I don't know if it really is, but what the heck.

[AudioDoctor]

8 hours ago, Jud said:

 

My info was in the Experian thing, and they had to pay for monitoring. Changed an email password as a result.

 

yep, same. So far, no passwords needed to be changed for me. I do change them periodically for the heck of it anyway though.