Patch Lady – a little paranoia goes a long way

While I’m a user of Facebook, the recent data leakages and sharing of data concerns me.  Thus we’re starting to see more transparency in what went wrong with the recent “data breach”…and I am using that “data breach” in quotes given that Facebook authorized the sharing of data due to how it interacts with it’s advertising partners.

I have spotted a few links and pages that addresses these issues and I’ll urge you to go check your profile settings, and especially if you’ve been impacted.

For example you can check if you liked any posts created by the Internet Research Agency and posted to Facebook.

Update:  Check to see if Cambridge got your data here:

While there, review your “ad settings”  .  I was amazed by some of the “ads” I supposedly liked and yet had no knowledge of.

As always, a good dose of paranoia is always helpful.  I have several rules of the Internet.

Rule 1:  If the site is free, you are the product.  Think about that often when you use a side that is “free” and act accordingly.

Rule 2:  If you appreciate the site, make sure you are giving back to the site either in the form of traffic to the site, or in donating to the site (yes, that’s a blatant plug for donating to Askwoody.com)

Rule 3:  Question the headline and where something is coming from shared to you on the Internet.  There are many places on the web to check out the validity of something shared on the web.  Snopes.com is one of the main sites, but in general if something sounds too good to be true, or is making a claim that makes you go “uh…hang on”, don’t play into the fake news frenzy going on and especially if you see something false, point out the false fact to others.  Yes, turn into one of those slightly annoying people that point out fake posts.  We will all be better for it.

Rule 4:  Use tools like www.virustotal.com to check out anything that just doesn’t feel right.  Soooo many times I see email spoofing come in and man are the attackers getting really good at pretending to be sent from a reputable site.  I also like https://www.reverse.it/ which showcases what the malicious site would do on a sample pc.

Rule 5:  Stay aware of the latest trend.  I am a fan of several sites to keep me aware of trending security issues.  Sites like:

• Ouch newsletter
• Incidents.org
• Brian Krebs

That’s just a sample of some of the ones I consider good sources of solid security information.

Rule 6:  This one is harder for consumers, a little easier for businesses.  See if you can turn on any anti-phishing solutions for your email.  Email is one of the TOP ways that malware, ransomware and phishes come in to attack you.  For businesses look to turn on some sort of “pre-filtering” service that runs links though a web filtering service first.  As a recipient of emails sent from someone using that service, you’ll notice that the links embedded in their email messages have an alias that goes through another URL first.  It looks especially phishy, but in reality it’s a protection device.  Office 365 has such an offering that {supposedly} can be added to any Office 365 plan.  Now my question is…. is this offered in the godaddy offerings as that’s my benchmark for testing to see how widespread security and paranoia settings are.  More on that as I confirm if that Office advanced email protection can be added to *any* Office 365 offering.