Reasons to be fearful 2020: Smishing, public Wi-Fi, deepfakes... and all the usual suspects Cybercriminals will continue to exploit tried-and-tested fraud methods but also adopt a couple of new takes and targets in the year ahead. Predictions from fraud specialists at Experian suggest continued threats from careless use of public Wi-Fi networks. With ever more spots available, users need to be careful of what data …
I am genuinely terrified about the future.
The prevalence of invasive tech is increasing, and not content with that, the b*stards are creating more of it.
And, day by day, governments and businesses do new and interesting horrible things with them.
And we don't even get the cool cyberpunk fashion or cool rebel hacker underground to go with it.
Has it occured to the geniuses that wrote the report that the prevalance of harmful data leaks and phishing attacks might have some enormous relation to companies constantly demanding that people hand over this personal information, which they then store insecurely on their servers? How do I know that the information I give them in order to read the report won't be leaked or misused in the ways described in the report?
I have an email for such things, it's not "disposable" in that I keep it active, I simply don't have anything important on it. As for phone numbers, I use a GoogleVoice number for that, which I know I never need to answer (or even have a device set up to receive calls from that number).
Little reminder for the Kung Fu International generation.
Outside the take-away, Saturday night
a bald adolescent, asks me out for a fight
He was no bigger than a two-penny fart
he was a deft exponent of the martial art
And some of the Gen X, Z, Snowflake crowd still believe that RAP was created within their lifetime...
"The company recommended people take the same precautions with text messages from unknown mobile numbers as they would with emails from unknown sources"
People apparently blindly accept email from unknown sources, clicking the links and forwarding as requested ; telling them to do the same with SMSs is not really a good idea.
Now that 4G and later data plans are available at reasonable cost, there is increasingly less need to use public Wi-fi services for anything remotely private or confidential, I'd have thought. Not a big user of mobile data so far, but a decent allowance for minimal spend should be in reach for most folks in markets where public Wi-fi is also available.
I don’t know about where you live but there are still large parts of the world that don't have good coverage on 4G, especially indoors. So WiFi is the only option to connect online.
And even if you are careful on what apps you use while on public WIFI who knows what apps are leaking data that are running in the background on your devices.
unfortunately you’ve not taken in to account how cheap people are.
I work with people who can quite easily afford a data plan to never need WiFi (excluding things like Netflix) but they have said they don’t see the point in buying it when there is so many free WiFi spots around, despite showing them articles and being that boring guy who always bangs on about privacy and security. I imagine they also use TalkTalk.
This. My multimillionaire mother in law gets her DSL (yes DSL...with a usage cap and Max speed of 8mbps) from the Post Office and buys £5 top ups for her phone and never uses data...
..all while trying to dodge paying for a Sky / Virgin subscription by streaming most of her TV via catch up services.
The more money people have the tighter they tend to be.
You don't get rich spending money...apparently...according to her.
So listen up kids, live a dull life, pile up your money and hand it to the next generation and teach them to do the same. Wash rinse repeat until your gene pool kicks out a legendary nutter that goes on an epic full on drug fuelled blow out or they're dumb enough for someone to con them out of it.
That seems to be the moral.
I still have some minor biz back in the home country so a tiny but necessary ckg account keeps me in the frantically urgent update msg loop. When an employee at the institution cut and ran with a ton of customer data, the solution boasted of the “well known and highly regarded” infosec US company Experian’s services that were offered free to customers for like, 5 years. I asked some old homeboys and girls grabbing the free stuff if they had ever heard of Experian. A resounding nope.
No thanks to Experian and its rue. I am, at least daily, appalled at the sloppy [internet] habits of my “boomer” friends. Most, I’d say 95%, have no comprehensible idea of what a vpn is or kinda how it works. Yet while I rant wearily and futilely about security and spend some precious pension funds on it, they blithely log into any old free wifi spot, and conduct [their] family financial matters at an order [or two] of magnitude greater than my pittance. This is truly a new meaning for “open source”—that is a rich petri dish for scam after scam, and Experian.
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