Posted on 12/23/2024 10:23:41 AM PST by Mean Daddy
With everything going on in the world, I wanted to reach out to see what other Freepers are doing online to protect yourselves, whether its subscribing to a monitoring service for activity under your name, using VPN (which one & why), password managers, multi-factor authentication etc.
What else should a person consider?
Bookmark
Chances of you getting hacked = almost none
Chances of you falling for a scam = increases as you get older.
Chances of you getting phished = depends on your behavior but the average is about 30%
Black hats go for the low-hanging fruit. People who share things on FB or do copy-and-paste memes are good at following orders without question.They can do look-backs to find the suckers that followed directions. People who do email chains are also good marks. If you fall for social engineering schemes, you are a target. If you answer calls from unknown numbers or do call back, you are ripe for the picking.
Do you use the free or paid version?
I believe they still offer a FULL WORKING FREE VERSION for a Trial period.
Not a fan of windows 11, nor is our IT guy.
He’s concerned both because it relies a lot on modules from other sources and is generally sloppy, but also because, by design, it logs every keystroke and sends them somewhere unknown.
Optery.com is great for removing your personal info from the internet.
As MeanDaddy points out above using long passwords is a good way to go. It can even be easy to remember. Your car, your birthday, etc. Iw@sborninDecember1985onthe15th would be a hard password to hack even though it is intuitive. Idrive@20Ford150pickup25 is another good one. The @ symbol for the letter A, plus capital letters and numbers.
Windows 11 has good security including hardware protection along with using Malwarebytes. Don’t click on any links from unexpected emails and avoid unsavory websites.
Dump Windows
I use Ubuntu full up Linux.
I use Brave as my browser( built-in VPN)
I pay for a private email
service, POVN out of WA state.
they protect emails pretty good.
My numerous passwords all have upper and lower
case letters, numbers, and special characters.
usually a different password for each important website.
I have to keep a password file because I have so many
but I keep the file on a computer
that is not connected to the internet
File on the computer as is the computer, is password protected.
The only hacks that have affected me are the ones where someone stole credit card info from the credit card companies or credit bureaus.
Someone hacked the system and bought
a computer in Ogden UT, with my credit card,
I live in Hawaii, the system flagged it and corrected the problem, with just an email.
I live in very rural Hawaii, and have lots of protections as my main contact with the world is my computer.
My computer and house phone are all on satellite.
The people that track that sort of stuff think I’m in southern California or in various other locations.
Total cost; a little over $100 per month, phone, computer, and email.
We buy an annual contact with a tech support group, and have been with them for about 8 years. The recommend Malwarebytes for our PCs, and we’ve been happy with it.
At first, after installing it, I was having weird things happen when using my desktop. They believed it was because I was using Win. 7. The solution was to install an older version of Malwarebytes, and it has been fine since then.
Thanks to ShadowAce for the ping!
- Make sure anything sensitive is using https.
- Make sure the URL is what you expect (e.g. an email offer for Amazon doesn’t take you to albundy.com).
- Never install an executable that you don’t know EXACTLY what the source is.
- If it sounds too good to be true...
- Verify ANYONE that makes a claim to be someone where you’ve no evidence (e.g. you get a text, ‘Hey Joe (correct), this is the company President Mike B (correct)...please do XYZ for me, I’m in a customer meeting and need help’ <— had this happen)
Most bad things come from breaking these rules.
That sounds like a good idea. Don’t know if it would help but it certainly wouldn’t hurt.
To form a new password, I take the number of pages in my Merriam-Webster dictionary, and multiply by a random number from my calculator. (Most have that function) That gives me a page number for selecting a word. I do that a second time in order select another word. Next, I concatenate those words, capitalizing the first letter of each word. A final application of the random number gives me a numeric value for a postfix. Now I have a nice password.
Pick one: Convenience vs. Privacy & Security
Use your computer's firewall. That requires study, time, and testing.
Use your computer's hosts file - in order to block sources.
DO NOT click on links in e-mail messages.
I’m glad I am somewhat pleasantly anti-social as far as on line stuff goes. I also use throw away accounts with bogus information so if someone gets into them, little of any value.
Over the past few years I’ve shut off or never renewed a lot of services and don’t miss them.
Less is more.
Windows will eventually go away here as those units die out.
I am mostly a Linux or Mac user these days.
Getting the spouse to move to Mac or Linux won’t be easy.
The only way to be completely safe from computers is not to use them.
Internet browsers
Use Private Browsing and Private Windows.
DO NOT remain signed in to any website.
DO NOT use the Internet browser's built-in password manager.
1) I use absolutely silly password using control codes, changed every two weeks or immediately if there’s a breach.
2) VPN is PIA. I change ports and routes every hour. I chose them because they were the only VPN taken to court that proved they had absolutely no log files. Also they stop a lot of stuff (cookies, ads, etc) from getting close to me.
3) Dongle for physical security and personal ID.
That’s about it, really. There’s a ton of stupid stuff I have to do because I work from home, but that’s my core.
1. Monitoring service — IdentityForce
2. VPN — ExpressVPN
3. Password Manager — LastPass
4. Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) — Enabled everywhere I can
Other Things I Use
5. Biometrics
5a. Facial Recognition — use in lieu of MFA where possible. Only on iPhone, not iPad or computer
5b. Fingerprint on Mac. My fingerprints can take a beating and sometimes stop working, so I have to do another scan or wait for the fingerprint to grow back out.
6. Authenticator Apps — I use the app the company supports, mainly Google Authenticator on a financial site and X.
7. Some companies will send an authentication code to their mobile app when you are on their web site on your computer.
8. Change passwords regularly. I change the most important ones more frequently; the unimportant sites I change much less frequently.
9. Complex Passwords. I use computer-generated complex passwords wherever possible. I generate the passwords on the Mac (under System Settings / New Password / Create Strong Password).
10. Passphrase. My master password in LastPass is a five word passphrase with some symbol and number substitutions tossed in (like number zero for letter oh, numeral 7 for letter t, exclamation point for numeral 1). The long passphrase is easy to remember — all you have to learn is where you did the substitutions. Here’s a good passphrase for LastPass to get you started: “D0nat3ToFReeR3publicT0day”
11. Beware of phishing emails. I got one that looked like Wells Fargo Bank the other day, but the English usage was atrocious. Log on to the financial institution to see if there is an alert there.
12. Set up Alerts on all your financial sites. I get alerts to text and email from our credit cards and banks. I get an alert from our credit card companies seconds after making a transaction.
13. Use “Virtual Credit Cards” for all of your online transactions. I use CapitalOne virtual cards. They give you a credit card number, CVV, and expiration date all tied to one merchant (it cannot be used at any other merchants). You can set an expiration date on the card or lock it manually. You can quickly unlock it for re-use. All of the Virtual Credit Cards roll up to your main credit card number. You see all of your transactions on your statement under the main number. You do not get separate statements for each virtual card. I REALLY REALLY LIKE this feature of CapitalOne. ApplePay masks your real credit card number and uses a virtual card in the background.
14. BitDefender antivirus.
It all sounds complex and complicated, but it really isn’t. All these things got added one at a time.
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