Seniors - learn to surf the net safely and avoid online scams

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Seniors - learn to surf the net safely and avoid online scams -

In this article, we explain how seniors can surf the net safely and avoid online scams. These tips for seniors to help them protect their personal information and protect their data into the hands of hackers, thieves and online fraudsters.

For many seniors the luxury of growing up in an environment driven technology with computers and access to the net was off (I remember my elementary school have ONE BBC microcomputer circa 1980 for the whole school - the wheels computer in every classroom with scores of excited, squealing students fear of amazing technology) for many older people may be technology intimidating, and with the increasing number of cyber criminals and hackers targeting seniors more often, it is of utmost importance for them to be able to secure and protect their laptop or PC

We examine how seniors can learn to surf the net safely and avoid scams - online. these tips are great for all Internet users

seniors - learn to surf the net safely and avoid online scams

  1. 1. If you received an email notification that you have won a prize - money or perhaps a car - chances are that you have probably not (especially if you have not entered any competitions recently)! It is more likely that this exciting email is a phishing scam asking you to click on a link in the e-mail or hand over your personal information. Clicking a link might take you to a fraudulent Web site (a copy of your bank login screen, or the UPS package delivery service asking you to confirm the details of your credit card, ) or it could link to a malicious site that will attempt to download malicious software to your computer asking you to either install software in order to "qualify for the award," or attempt to install malware silently, using exploits in your browser or Adobe flash.

Other email scams to look out for emails that ask for your bank details so that you can claim millions of dollars that have been left to you by a questionable person you never heard of. Apparently, you are the last known next of kin - but it is likely a scam

Scammers getting their game so if you receive an email that looks weird, friends or family members or your bank asking you to provide your personal information such as passwords and user names, never to consider these details. If you are worried, or have any concerns about an email, simply delete it and forget everything. Just as a telephone call - it is important, your bank or family member will find another way to contact you

2. When you're out and about and possibly to decide to take. coffee in your local coffee shop and use their Wi-Fi - think before you connect. Did you know that it takes a few seconds for a hacker or thief to access your personal data? Public Wi-Fi hotspots give no encryption security, but you can use a VPN to protect your device and all information about it. Check out our great tips to stay safe while using the Wi-Fi

3. If you receive a notification on your computer or your phone asking you to update your software - it's a good idea to update if it has the latest security patches. It is also a good idea to install firewall and antivirus software. Keep your operating system (Internet Explorer, Safari) update for maximum security benefits. But beware, if you receive a phone call from a company abroad and ask you to follow their instructions as they are updated your PC for you, simply hang up - they try to install software malware on your computer

4. When you visit a website, you will see at the beginning of the URL is "http" or "https". the difference here is the all important "S" means secure, and website you visit with "https" is secure, which means that part of your session is encrypted. If you click a link in an email that takes you to your bank Web site, take care to look for "https" connection (the address bar is usually a beautiful green color, safe too)! If the "S" is not there, it might be a phishing scam designed to steal your login information. If in doubt, always go directly to your website from the bank from a trusted bookmark or a Google search -. Not a link in an email

See my previous article for others Internet safety tips for seniors .

If you want to know more about HMA! Pro VPN , do please send us an email and one of our support donkeys will be more than happy to help.

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GCHQ: Forget complicated passwords to increase security

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GCHQ: Forget complicated passwords to increase security -

Forget using complex passwords - that is recommendations of a new report " orientation Password: Simplify your approach "by the British intelligence agency GCHQ and the Centre for the protection of national infrastructure (CPNI) - which has been reported by a number of new exits. But is this really what GCHQ warning

After reading the report "Guidance Password: Simplify your approach" ? GCHQ are not really ask people to use weak passwords, they ask iT to simplify things for users, which I think is common sense. A chain is as strong as its weakest link and if you ask the average user to do too much, human nature shows that shortcuts and therefore weaknesses, will be introduced. Since most of people can remember 7 (+ / - 2) characters (which is why the license plates and telephone numbers easily fall into this range) - most passwords are around the same length because they are easy to remember you . Nothing more than that, or if the password is too complicated, leading to headaches for most people.

It has long been known that if you give a user a complex password, they will more often than not simply write it on a Post-it to someone one happens to walk into the office to see. If, for example, I wanted to break into a bank, I'll try to get a temporary job, or get on the cleaning staff because it would be likely that someone would have stuck a major password somewhere around their workstation.

In any event, if a government agency wanted to see the data that has been password protected they would have no problem at all, as they had either issue an order court, threatening user / admin with jail time or just breaking in themselves. Or a combination of the three

.

As for malicious attackers, once they are in a system, it is almost game over. Once inside, just copy a password file to offline cracking is easy.

Using arc table an attacker has the world all the time to crack your password offline. They simply watch the encrypted value of the password that is stored in the file, and a rainbow will give you the clear text table - something that usually take days or weeks to brute force be by yourself . When a password is stored on a server, it is usually "chopped", which means it is encrypted so no one can read it.

For example, the MD5 hash ILoveSausages 2738855a9d9c78488616e1fa7180f125 =

how hashing works, is that it can not go one direction, which means that you can hash ILoveSausages to obtain the hash value, but you can not take the hash value, in this case 2738855a9d9c78488616e1fa7180f125 and work out what the original text was.

Therefore, the only way to find the password would be to try to hash each combination of letters, numbers and characters until you finally get one that corresponds to the hash value you have. As you can imagine, this could take forever, given the processing power of today's computers.

With a rainbow table, someone, or a group of people have already done the hard work if you simply feed your hash 2738855a9d9c78488616e1fa7180f125 and it should give you the original text -. ILoveSausages

Think of a rainbow table as a reverse phone book. In a telephone directory, you look at the names, in alphabetical order, and it gives you a number. But if you only have the number? You need to start the first page and go to the bottom of each page to see if you can find a match, all the way from Mr. Aardvark Mrs Zulu.

rainbow tables have cracked some passwords up to 10 characters, so using three words strung together to create a password is around 15-20 characters much better than a complex password of 7, which is what GCHQ recommends in its report

eg "orientation Password Simplify your approach." ILikeToEat2BigMacsDaily could be sure E14Fg * &

and the Big Mac password is much easier to remember, so it would not need to be written, and I doubt he is one of 10,000 common passwords that can be found simply by searching the web.

GCHQ also recommends that IT admins put a more robust logging and auditing system in place, so they can quickly identify and isolate any behavior that appears suspicious.

Basically, GCHQ notify IT Admins to follow a " defense in depth " approach, something decent IT administrators have done for decades, and stressing simply that user passwords are only part of the picture -. a party that has become unnecessarily complex for users over the years

There are chances that, in reality, you are more likely to have your password guessed / used to get into your accounts by someone you know. Whether an audit partner curious emails, a child trying to overcome the age restrictions on Netflix or a disgruntled employee looking to embezzle funds or simply destroy data / cause chaos.

With so many of our daily activities online, social media to online banking, we have many different passwords for user names and passwords, and of course, remember all those passwords is difficult - though we often write them down, or just forget. The BBC recently reported that British citizens had each an average of 22 online passwords

"orientation Password: Simplify your approach ". also touch the subject of blacklists. A simple Google search will bring up lists of common passwords, made up of 10,000 other passwords that hackers use to try to brute force a connection (ie simply try each password up that one works, known as dictionary attack .) If the iT department uses as a black list and makes sure no one is allowed to use one password common, it stops almost the dictionary attack in its tracks.

do and not to do to create a secure password

  • not store passwords in plain text on a server, or written down on paper - that a huge security risk
  • Do use a safe password, such as KeePass
  • not use personal information in your passwords (like the name of your pet, or anniversary from someone). A hacker can easily find these personal information from your Facebook or other social media profile
  • not share passwords with anyone
  • Do use two-factor authentication that provides another layer of protection

GCHQ's report also notes that "the change password regular harms rather than improves security, so avoid placing the burden on users. However, users must change their password on the indication or suspicion of compromise. "The idea behind this advice is that IT Admins should try to make everything as simple as possible for users, because once a password is stolen, it is generally used in a few days, thus forcing users to change 3 months later does not really add to safety.

what is a "strong password?"

Microsoft sets the minimum requirements for a complex password as: -

  • passwords must not contain any samAccountName (account name) value or displayName (full name) value . both the user checks are not case sensitive.

- the samAccountName is verified in its totality to determine whether it is part of the password If the samAccountName is less than three characters, this check is ignored

- the displayName is analyzed for delimiters: commas, periods, dashes or hyphens, underscores, spaces, pound signs, and tabs. If any of these delimiters are found, the displayName is divided and all analyzed sections (chips) are confirmed not to be included in the password. Tokens that are less than three characters are ignored, and substrings tokens are not checked. For example, the name "Erin M. Hagens" is split into three tokens :. "Erin", "M" and "Hagens" Because the second token is only one character long, it is ignored. Therefore, this user could not have a password that included either "erin" or "hagens" as a substring anywhere in the password

  • Passwords must contain characters from three of the five following categories:

- uppercase characters from European languages ​​(a to Z, with diacritics, Greek and Cyrillic characters)

- tiny European languages ​​(a through z, sharp -s, with diacritics, Greek and Cyrillic characters)

- base 10 digits (0 to 9)

- the non-alphanumeric characters: ~ @ # $% ^ & * _- = + `| () {} []:;" '<> /

-.? Any Unicode character is categorized as an alphabetic character but is not uppercase or lowercase. This includes Unicode Asian languages ​​

A complex password can be either :.

  • A personally chosen password, which is complicated by adding numbers and / or special characters in it (for example susi - !?> susi98 #).
  • These types of passwords are pretty easy to remember, so there is no need to write them. And if there is a need, store them in the vault password apps ONLY.
  • The complexity here is the result of a less likely chance that the password can be guessed by the hacker using personal information, such as a hacker could find on Facebook that the name of the spouse of the victim is "susi" and thus attempts to connect with this. They will of course fail if the victim has added numbers and special characters, as they can not know eventually those who were used
  • A password randomly generated - . These are not of course to remember and should be safely stored (password vault). When generating passwords with maximum complexity of parameters (eg, numbers, letters, special characters, uppercase, lowercase), it is not only impossible for a hacker to guess the password using the personal information of the victim, they can not even brute force, it (trying random strings to succeed) if it is of sufficient length, because there is just too combinations

using simplified password is meaningful only when :.

  • The password is something unimportant, as no huge problems could result from unauthorized access
  • Make at least a little complex adding numbers and / or random characters in it (susi -.> susi 9421!)

Ideally, passwords should -

  • never contain personal information such as names of friends, family members or pets, streets, dates of birth, etc.
  • never be alphabetic only, as it is too easy to guess and brute force
  • always contain figures (not obvious numbers such as birthdays though)
  • always contain special characters (not necessarily at the end but the beginning or middle)
  • Be as long and varied as possible

a good tip is to use numbers on your passwords do mean something to you. For example, 6210 (an old Nokia phone belonging to you once) or the date you had a wonderful holiday 041985. These are the numbers you can remember because of a relationship with her, and is something that you would never declare publicly as you do with birth dates, streets, etc.

there are many settings too - for example, when you want to use someone's birth date in your password, the reverse. (For example susi102085 -> susi580201)

The proper behavior is to use personal passwords, but complex, or randomly generated passwords -.! And in both cases, only save them in password boxes, and nowhere else

I think GCHQ really make some good points in their report, although, of course, it is too easy to be skeptical of a government agency spying wanting everyone to use weak passwords.

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Intelexit campaign: Helping spy agency workers leave their jobs

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Intelexit campaign: Helping spy agency workers leave their jobs -

The Intelexit campaign, an anti-monitoring initiative launched by the collective Peng urges the NSA (National Security Agency) and GCHQ (Government Communications Headquarters) agents to reconsider working for the intelligence services.

If you have a problem with alcohol, you can seek the help of AA (Alcoholics Anonymous). If you try to fight drug abuse, you can seek advice and assistance to NA (Narcotics Anonymous). Now there is a recovery group campaign, Intelexit to help the NSA and GCHQ agents who are unhappy in their jobs, because of moral conflicts, to think of leaving the NSA or GCHQ "as a act of personal strength and contribution to democracy "and start a new life.

a spokesman for the campaign Intelexit Ariel Fischer said that" it is very difficult to reach people working in the secret services, because they are so cloistered off from the rest of society. "Fischer added that" this is a really innovative way to reach out to them "and" also shows employees Intelexit is serious about the help. "

The campaign Intelexit launched just a few weeks ago in the US and the UK with provocative billboard messages on trucks parked near buildings NSA and GCHQ, y including "Listen to your heart, not to private phone calls", "hoping to serve your people? Ended up spying on them? "And" The intelligence community needs a backdoor. "More recently, Intelexit militants used a drone to drop leaflets on the basic Dagger Military Complex in Germany, listing the reasons why information workers to leave their jobs and whether they are" ready to leave ? "

Fischer said: "We know there are many, many people working there that conflict, anxiety and ultimately completely against these organisms are so ... more those individuals begin to realize they can take a stand, and they have the support of the outside world, well maybe some people will be forced to act on their principles. "

since Edward Snowden informed the world of the intrusive mass surveillance capabilities of the NSA (he apparently informed his superiors about his mass surveillance concerns 10 times before documents leaks) - ? how many other employees of the intelligence agencies are questioning the ethics of their job

A former top executive at NSA whistleblower Thomas Drake and, recently spoke to CBC about the difficulties of intelligence workers face when trying to quit their jobs, whether a whistleblower or not. Drake said that "there are also people who simply want to leave the intelligence world because they are more compatible with who they are, or their values. or they just reached a point where it's time to move on. "

for all workers of the NSA and GCHQ are considering abandoning their positions, the help is at hand for Intelexit campaign, including information on why you should consider handing in your notice, and there is even a form so that you can generate a personalized letter of resignation.

Speaking to Wired, Fischer said the Intelexit campaign was a "huge success" and a number of former and current. Temporary workers have reached them, although it did not say exactly how many

The Intelexit campaign includes a number of reasons to consider leaving the intelligence agencies, including:

FREEDOM AND DEMOCRACY
because of the level of confidentiality given to them by the state, and the lack of supervision, the secret services can easily start abusing their power and threaten basic freedoms.

OUT-OF-CONTROL DATA COLLECTION
intelligence services to gather information for people profile and assess their potential threat to the state

NSA n ' has yet to comment Intelexit the campaign, however, GCHQ Wired sent the following statement :.

"The work of GCHQ is performed in a strict legal framework and there is no question of anyone being asked to do anything illegal or they consider unethical. GCHQ actively encourage staff to discuss concerns they might have about their work and are proud of the structures we have in place to support this. "

Fischer said the aim of the campaign is Intelexit not to attack the NSA intelligence agencies or GCHQ, but" humanize ".

How many intelligence agents will take knowledge of the country and leave their jobs - well, I guess we'll never know

for more information on Intelexit campaign, visit their website

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Meet Pavel and Lexy - HMA! Affiliate Marketing Team

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Meet Pavel and Lexy - HMA! Affiliate Marketing Team -

Pavel - Affiliate & Performance Marketing Manager Privax

"I'm responsible for you receive or do not receive your commissions Affiliate. I am the master of converting traffic and affiliate relationship manager. If there is a business opportunity - I am after. I arrive early in the morning to beat the Tube chaos of London, and also enjoy a peaceful stroll in Soho usually buzzing.

I have a passion for football and all other sports. I enjoy talking about twelve o'clock on the economy and politics -. I do not really understand, and of course, I love the good weather in London

I enjoy a drink or two in the pub if I do not go to the gym the evening. Although I do not travel very often, hopefully visiting all continents to enjoy my stories to my grandchildren, so who knows if I'll live in a rain / cold and sunny warm tropical countries / / / / Wind the time I'm old and settled. Or young - but it depends if I become a successful affiliate myself and retire before I'm 40

As for now, I'm in London (of course it rains), and I type my story my affiliate traffic continues to convert better day by day - fabulous time "

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Lexy is short Aleksandra (yes, with a KS). it is famous for its random jokes and stories, and frequently cites the 0

in her free time she likes to travel, drink coffee and read online . that, or walking his blind poodle, Tina, throughout the city.

as a member of Hide My Ass! affiliate marketing team, you will find Lexy optimize other sites people, development of partnerships and writing newsletters.

Sometimes hear you say something like "Hide My Ass! server network is like the Energizer Bunny, it keeps growing and growing and growing and growing ... "or something equally random.

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I know where your cat Lives: Why the images displaying cats can not be the idea purrfect

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I know where your cat Lives: Why the images displaying cats can not be the idea purrfect -

"I know where your cat Lives" is a project highlighting risks people take when sharing pictures of their feline friends online

to star in YouTube-paw videos in campaigns against online censorship. - there is little doubt that cats, for millions of people worldwide, are the champions of the internet. I did a quick check on Instagram and Flickr, and at the time of this writing, more than 85 million users have downloaded photos tagged with the word "cat."

Owen Mundy, an art professor at Florida State University, created the site " I know where your cat lives " to illustrate the number of people who unwittingly give their online privacy. Since its launch in July 2014, the site has collected more than 5.3 million photos of cat-tastic

"Everything should be private by default and it is not! " - Owen Mundy

the idea behind the project, I know where your cat lives, came when the art professor Mundy was using Instagram to photograph his children three years . Speaking at Forum L2 Munday said: "I understood that the application had recorded the coordinates photos and upload them and make them public, and I do not remember having been requested by the application for permission to do so. So I wanted to translate that experience into something creepy was still maintained the creepiness fun, and I thought what better way to approach the subject as something like the Internet already "Cats. - If you have forgotten [1945003!]

Big Bang data: "Cat pictures are everywhere, funny and harmless - or so it would seem. But there is a sinister undercurrent and a serious point to make. "

The project, I know where your cat Lives will be exhibited along with 50 other works of artists exploring how data is changing our world in the exhibition Big Bang data opening 3rd December - 28. February 2016 at Somerset House in London

How to stop a leakage of your geographic data location

When you share a picture of a cat, a dog, and of course, the inevitable selfie - actually an image using one of many sites such as the hosting Flickr or Instagram image, it is important to check that you are only sharing your images, not your geographical location data.

Fortunately, there are a number of guides to help you configure your device to ensure that your location is not found online.

  • How to turn off location services on Google Chrome
  • How to turn off location services on Safari Mac OS
  • How to turn off location services on Opera
  • How to turn off location services on iPhone
  • How to disable Android security location services

There are many privacy and tools for you help keep your private information safe and secure - including H ide My Ass! Pro VPN . Controlling the amount of our personal data we leaked on the Internet is not easy, but with a little effort, you can keep it under control.

For more information on Hide My Ass! and how a VPN can help you regain your online privacy Please visit our main site.

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VPN special Christmas deals continue to Hide My Ass

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VPN special Christmas deals continue to Hide My Ass -

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VPN Australia, New South Wales server added to the HMA! Pro VPN network - much more

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VPN Australia, New South Wales server added to the HMA! Pro VPN network - much more -

We are pleased to announce that your favorite VPN provider (Hide My Ass Pro VPN!) recently added several VPN servers! Over the past two months, we have added a VPN Australia, New South Wales server to our network. We also added 3 Australia, Sydney and USA Virtual VPN servers.

27 VPN server was added to the HMA! Pro VPN network over the past month with 3443 IP addresses and 3 new locations. Wowzers

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