Hey guys,
OK, some interesting things happening lately…
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In case you didn’t know, Facebook tracks what you do across millions of websites EVEN when you’re not on Facebook. They use something called a Facebook Pixel, a small piece of code dropped on millions of websites across the internet. The social network uses the info gathered to later target you with personalized ads, based on what they learn about you.
Well good news, the FB just announced that it is offering a feature called “Off-Facebook Activity”, that will allow you to delete all the data stored by 3rd party websites about you, which means pretty much every website you have visited! People in Ireland, South Korea, and Spain will have access to the tool first, and it will be rolled out in the coming months to all Facebook users.
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Be warned, the IRS is saying there is a huge IRS posing campaign going on, where very realistic looking emails are pretending to come from the IRS tax office, and they are tricking people into downloading malicious programs onto their system. As we discuss extensively in the training, do NOT TRUST ANYTHING you receive. And remember, official government tax offices always send you information via official “snail mail” letters, NOT emails.
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A nice simple article by the good guys over at Ghostery, Inc. explaining how to limit ad tracking on your mobile devices – whether they are interest-based ads, and location-based ads.
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It turns, out a bunch of browser extensions were caught compiling data on millions of users without their knowledge. As we mention in the Browser security section of the training, please be extremely careful to ONLY install the browser extensions you absolutely need to do your work, as these extensions can view everything you do in your browser – which is, lets be honest, everything they need to know about you!
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There has been a lot of uproar lately about how Google, Apple, Amazon and Microsoft were discovered having paid contractors to listen in on millions of audio recordings captured by their home digital assistants, such as Alexa, Home, Siri and Cortana. Although they all say the recordings were anonymized, apparently there was a lot of very sensitive audio captured from millions of users and analyzed to see how accurate their AI interpretation systems were.
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A nice article by David Koff @themacdweeb showing whistleblowers, journalists, and privacy advocates how to lock down their mobile devices be able to communicate securely
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Bravo to the new Guardian Firewall app, which runs in the background of an iOS device, and blocks location trackers, while at the same time compiling a list of all the times your apps attempt to deploy them. Whats cool is it does so without breaking your apps in any way. Plus, the list gives you a much deeper insight than you would normally have into what your phone is doing behind the scenes. Definitely worth checking out:
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We are all seeing on the news how dangerous and disruptive ransomware attacks are, especially to all the local city governments that have been hot by ransomware as of late. We discuss how to prevent, or at least mitigate the effects of ransomware in the training. Here is a valuable article that discusses 13 ways to protect oneself against such an attack
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Speaking of ransomware, here is a wonderful service that currently detects 750 different ransomwares.
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It’s really gotten to the point where the tech giants such as Facebook, Google and Amazon know more about you than the government does. Yup, you read that right. they actually have so much information on you that at this point they can even predict your behavior. @Wired has a good scoop on this:
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Check this out: apparently 1/2 of all logins into social media websites is fraudulent, via automated bots, “with the goal of disseminating spam, stealing information, spreading social propaganda and executing social-engineering campaigns targeting trusting consumers.” So it goes to show how valuable our social media accounts are to the bad guys, and how suspicious we must be with what we are being presented, whenever on these platforms.
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Please be safe out there everyone.
#ClickGameOver