Your private data has been nabbed: Please update your life as soon as possible while we deflect responsibility "I am writing with regard to a data security incident relating to you." Here we go again. Yet another bunch of jokers has allowed a third party to saunter onto its network and rummage around where it keeps sensitive customer information. It's enough to drive you to drink. (Mine's a boilermaker, thanks.) This has been a busy …
> Pity those emails are mostly sent from a "no-reply" address.
Come on, even if they did get your mail, you don't expect the marketing creatures to understand it, do you? They famously never take "no" for an answer, so the minor technical detail of your parents' demise is definitely not a reason for you not to buy, buy a lot, buy again.
Unfortunately my own father, rest in peace, fell victim of two stupid devices sold in "Call now!" TV ads. He ended paying three times more that the things actually cost.
The best gift you can give your parents is to configure their phones so they autoreject any calls not in their contact list, just make sure their contact list includes emergency services and whatever phone number they use to tell you were to get vaccinated, more so if you are in a country with a waiting list instead of "Get vaccinated and get free beer, burger and fries" like the USA.
Of course it is your fault! You used their service and you knew better when you went for them anyway. You should have stayed away. You know it. You feel it. You promise yourself to do so next time. Then, and only then, it will not be your fault.
Well... unless you forgot to change bank, house, nationality, gender, body, soul and also died and were reborn. Next time you should stay dead and let the computer buy your stuff.
Cheers.
And they sign you up to a year's free Experian subscription, supposedly so you can monitor your credit rating just in case bad people start taking out loans using your credentials, and default on them.
But now Experian haz all your data, and we know what happens next...
Paris, coz we know there will get messy.
So I suppose I'd better switch bank, move house and change nationality. If I don't, well, it'll be my fault, won't it?
Ah, so now the relocation to France becomes clear...
And if the head cleaner can't bring her Great Dane to work, how is Scooby going to solve the mystery of the phantom crapper?
Although I don't think that's what he meant, and I know you were only joking anyway, I once knew someone who - in his early twenties - only had one goal in life. Well, a collection of steps to an ultimate goal, anyway.
All he ever wanted was a) to get married before he was 40, b) have kids, c) get an allotment (inherited from his father, actually), d) sit by the fire with his pipe and slippers.
The first one was looking unlikely, as his success rate with the opposite sex was not very good, So he signed up with a Russian dating agency and was introduced to someone. He married her on their second meeting, and she fell pregnant that night.
I lost him off the radar once he'd managed to get her and his child over here, so I don't know how it turned out in the end. However, I have mentioned him before - he was the one who had filthy personal habits at work and at home (his was the cat which routinely peed behind the TV and blew his VHS recorder).
I knew a bloke just like that. Last time I saw him we were in our mid twenties and bumped into each other at a supermarket. I didn't recognise him at first when he spoke to me - he looked about twenty years older than his age, with an angry looking woman and two screaming kids in his wake. After questioning me on what I was up to in life, he had the cheek to ask me when I was going to "grow up" and have a family.
The kind that show up and bark a few ill thought out orders and storm off, only to return a few days with newer, better, ill thought out plan! Only to show up next week and call a meeting to come up with a better plan!! That was a year in hell... two times with two different bosses.
Spawn of satan as he has the biggest mouth of the icons available!
The kind that show up and bark a few ill thought out orders and storm off, only to return a few days with newer, better, ill thought out plan! Only to show up next week and call a meeting to come up with a better plan!!
Been there too. Lately though it seems like politicians have picked up on this. The wilder the proposal and the more shocked response they get seems to encourage them. I'm believing bosses and politicians should both spend 100% of their time on the golf course and never, ever even get close to the office.
"The wilder the proposal and the more shocked response they get seems to encourage them."
No, that's a carefully planned strategy. It's been going on for years.
1) Come up with a plan no one will be happy with
2) Make it even more outrageous and announce it to the public as a proposal or speculation.
3) Bask in the outrage
4) Release original outrageous plan, which looks like a major back-pedal from step 2
5) Take the credit as the public gasp with amazement that this outrageous plan is more palatable than the insane one from step 2 and accept it with relief.
Being a Brit, a boliermaker is simply half a draught mild mixed with a bottled ale e.g. Bob and Abbot.
Somehow I managed to pass my A levels despite drinking several Bob and Abbots most lunchtimes. Thankfully I managed to kick that habit before becoming a responsible adult.
True Boilermaker is shot of whisky and a beer, the braver souls would drop the shot glass in the glass, and hammer it back in one go... Others would sip both. I learned this at my dad's knee, the guy I'm slowly becoming! And I have the greatest respect for both the old man, and his old man, they are both missed daily.
Interesting. beer with a whisky chaser was a well known tipple about 40 years+ ago.
F*cked if I know why anyone would, seems like a waste of both, and probably the drinker too.
There was even an adage
Beer on whisky very risky
Whisky on beer, never fear.
Which has all the truth of a politician's election promise.
Yep. That's what I'm guessing.
My fave was a pint of snakebite (strong lager and strong cider) with a liqueur glass of Drambuie dropped in. Two of those set the tone for the night. Duuuuuuuuurrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.......
Hahaha! Every pint of lager I had after that, just made me a little more sober.
My fave was a pint of snakebite (strong lager and strong cider)
At my 21st (many years ago in a town far, far away) I was force-fed[1] Guiness and Southern Comfort[2] by my then fellow-students. Presumably on the basis that it would get me amusingly drunk quite quickly. What they didn't realise (not being close aquaintences) is that I'd fully inherited my dads ability to drink almost everyone under the table [3].
[1] Well - they offered to buy al the drinks and it would have been rude to refuse. I was bought up to be polite after all..
[2] A commbo that covers the deficiences of both drinks and almost produces something drinkable. But, as intimated above, the drinks were free and that dramatically improves the flavour.
[3] One of the few useful things I inherited.. I won several "draughts with whisky" competitions at the student bar.. (draughts with whisky shots - you take a piece, you have to down it in one. I used to have a pint of mild and a nice sausage and bacon butty beforehand to act as a buffer)
Less a cocktail, more just lining drinks up
And thus spoiling the taste of both. Mined ewe, if it's American "whiskey"[1] it's probably going to be improved by the application of beer (especially American beer - a case of two wrongs really do make a right)
[1] As the saying goes: they call it sippin' whiskey because only someone with no taste buds takes more than a sip..
Every time you sign up for an account somewhere, start a fresh text file & save it as the name of the site: EG "$ShiteSite.Dingleberry.co.uk.txt". Every question they require to register gets added to the text file along with the fake PII you use to fill it out. Fake name, fake DOB, fake address, fake everything. Each question & fake answer gets added to the text file. That way you can open the file & regurgitate the lies back to them in a week/month/year/whenever you have to deal with them again.
If you make your 1st name the 1st half of the site url & your last name the other half, it becomes obvious whom "leaked" the PII the spammers are now trying to use to scam you. If your DOB is something no normal person could ever possibly be (say April the 41st, 1822) then they can use it all they want to try & social engineer themselves into other parts of your life. If your mailing address is really the nearest police station, the scum will get a nice surprise when they try to come rob "you". If you give your phone number as that of said police department, the scammers may find themselves in for a nasty surprise when they try to scam a cop. My vehicle? It's an original Model A Ford. My home? A cave in the middle of Inverness. My pet's name? "Shitstain". My mom's maiden name? "Phuqu". My favorite sports team? The Sacramento Beavers. Yadda yadda yadda, and all of it gets recorded in the file.
"But we need your real info for $Reason!" Fine. You can have it just after you give me yours. What's that, you don't want to? Funny that, huh?
Use fake PII that identifies the site at which it was used. Then when (never if) it leaks it proves from whence it came & whom to never do business with ever again. ConsumerOpinion BureauDotCom I'm looking at you. *Evil grin* Not my real PII & I've poisoned the files of all the scum you gave it to. *Double handed TheFinger* Muh Hahahahahahahaha...
*Cough*
Enjoy a pint. It's Friday! =-D
I have a number of domains running at an ISP so I am pretty much in control of email accounts.
When someone/something online DEMANDS an email address or I suspect it'll be handed off to marketeers the moment I hit "submit", I generate an alias which allows me to track who I gave it to (say, trace.google@) and provide that. As it's an alias I still get the confirmation email with the 5K worth of text that is the confirmation URL plus all the tracking data, but they only have a disposable email address.
As for further details, I have an entirely new date of birth too that I have been using consistently eough to withstand cross checks (read: years).
I used to use spamgourmet for it, but I found this to work better.
What ab-so-lu-te-ly pisses me off is the insistence on a full credit card for subscriptions. No, prepay of one-time card, no, it must be a card they can keep sucking on - translated: they lose that and you have a problem. Which means those companies tend not to get my money. At all. Ever. I have a number of subscriptions running off a prepay which I fill up every so often. Much safer.
Said it before and I'll say it again: Me purchasing something from you does not mean we have a relationship. You *need* nothing from me beyond a method of payment and an address, and both of those should be erased *by law* as soon as you have delivered the goods.
It works fine at the newsagent; no reason it can't work just as well at an online retailer - irrespective of how many rockets the owner has.
No. When you look, even briefly, at a webpage, you have implicitly signed a contract in blood that for evermore they --- and their designated agent, mostly Google --- have the right to track you ( and show you adverts ) until one or the other parties is dead.
Otherwise the Internet will die.
You *need* nothing from me beyond a method of payment and an address
A lot of the better vendors allow checkout as guest where the only thing required is an email address and the payment is handled by their payment processor. Since I run my own email server (and no - it's *not* MS Exchange) I generally use $firstname-$sitename@mydomain.blah.blah as the email. That way, if I start getting spam to that address I can dob them in to the Info Commissioner on GDPR violations..
At the place I used to work before becoming a (in US sense) bum (that is, retired), the IT folks used to advise us, when filling out the "answers" to those silly "security questions," to use the same word that made no sense in the context: "Birthplace?" "Green." "First sweetheart?" "Green." (Well of course I was.) "Street you lived on as a kid?" "Green." And so on.
If nothing else, when the "We didn't secure your PII, now you're responsible for everything" letters appeared, it made for an easy system of what nonsense word not to use the next time around.
Feh. Those who have no need to get my real PII get something from a list including various local Federal buildings (the FBI and the Federal courts tend to hang out there) or various local sheriffs’ office headquarters, or, if I’m feeling nasty, FBI HQ or Secret Service HQ in Washington. Complete with the appropriate phone numbers and the name of whoever was boss a decade or more prior but isn’t there anymore. (Certain local sheriffs aren’t available any more because they’re in prison, usually Federal prison, for being very naughty boys. And yes, they’re all boys. One local county has had two of the three prior sheriffs spend time in Club Fed.) Given that FBI HQ is located on a very famous street, one would think that using that address would be a dead giveaway. One would be wrong.
A nice throwaway email address, from Gmail or Zoho or Outlook or Hotmail or Yahoo or something is good for those kind of PII entries, too; create a throwaway with fake PII, answer their email, cancel the email. Or just abandon it and never use it again. (Some services, such as Zoho, want a phone number; there are lots of ways to generate a temporary phone number.) As I used fake info, Gmail et al can’t even complain to me. I’ve probably pissed Google off and they probably have noted my IP… except that I try to sign up from the local IHOP, using their extremely shitty wireless. Which I signed up for using a throwaway address and a spoofed MAC.
Generate a nice simple text file with the various fake PII, put the file on two or three encrypted USB sticks (NTFS EFS is good enough, and can be read by Windows, Mac, and even Linux, with the proper tools) and it’s portable, can’t easily be read by the ungodly, and keeps track of the fakes.
Not so extreme, but I always register, where unavoidable, with the next cab off the rank on my mailserver, so that when I get a spam from dodgybarstewards.co.za coming in to DiViDeD4357@, I know they got their mailing list from wankstain.co.uk (it's a specialist site about church architecture) and can send an email to abuse@ asking if they were hacked or whether they have a tidy little side earner.
Solicitors, et al., are terrified of the money-laundering legislation because individuals have strict personal liability that could see them imprisoned - so they are typically over-zealous in their compliance.
Presumably we need similar strict penalties for failure to protect personal data if that duty is to be taken as seriously - perhaps a long period of community service on turd patrol?
More likely: A law making sure you can lose the PI of your clients without risk of anything bad happening. That's what you pay those lobbyists for after all.
(Obviously all in the name of free enterprise and helping the economy (and somebody think of the children too).)
Alistair, your Spanish is fine, hotos kind of precludes procreation.
Ninety percent of the 'latest' thing items that show up in the world are only of real interest to the whippersnappers who are trying to sell them, the best things to acquire while en route to becoming your dad are health and peace of mind.
The other handy thing is a nice knobbly stick to poke the whippersnappers with.
The unconvincingly apologetic "data security incident" message is accompanied by the usual platitudes and assurances that everything is being done too late to be of any use.
I've just got one of those. It lists all the information anyone would need to pretend to be me to my bank, while saying that everything's bulletproof as my bank would send me a text message to check I'm me. In their world, SIM swapping is not a thing which ever happens. You know, where n'eer do wells use the same leaked information, ring up my phone provider, pretend to be me, get a new SIM card sent out, and then empty someone's bank accounts.
Also, as everything is apparently 100% safe, they don't even offer the year's traditional ID theft protection.
GDPR should be updated so people who write bollocks e-mails like that and then bugger off to play another round of golf should be shot.
> It lists all the information anyone would need to pretend to be me to my bank
That's a classic. If you make a poll, I guess most people all over the world have received an email like that at some point.
That, and the fake phishing emails, where emails from your bank asking you to do stuff do not originate from your bank, but from some cryptic unrelated domain. Everything is done so you have absolutely no way to know if the email is genuine or not. Do you feel lucky?
Indeed.
They might have had some use of calling in the expensive security consultants before the shit hit the fan, to ensure that, when it did, they would be prepared.
But, hey, that costs money.
These days, reputation costs nothing, so the beancounters say no.
Until it happens.
Then it becomes a PR exercise, and that goes into the marketing budget.
Still not important.
"They might have had some use of calling in the expensive security consultants before the shit hit the fan"
More fundamentally they might have avoided the event by a teensy bit of forethought. Pretty much every business I have consulted with or worked for has either ignored security entirely until the incident (and forgotten it again after), or appointed someone to be exclusively "responsible" for it and then ignored it entirely regardless of incidents (except for the PR angle).
The most basic and overriding cause of security incidents is always not technical failings but management incompetence. The technical failings are a secondary effect of the incompetence. Just for example, on two separate contracts I was supposed to manage "information governance", but in both cases there wasn't any to manage and nobody at either board or management level could even clearly define what it meant.
They leave the fecal matter in the office to not have to clean that at home. It's far easier to have someone else clean your mess. I've seen people who are obsessed about their house order and cleanness, being the worst when it comes to the office order and cleanness (and many other common places).
Probably they are the same who looks after *your* data - who cares if someone steals them? They are only interested in the safety of their own ones.
Yes, I'll admit, I've been on the other side of that mail.
"Our upstream providers have informed us that your email address has turned up in some password collection or other. They have also given us the first two characters of something that might be a password, password hash, or something else entirely, they do not know and will not give us the rest. Do the letters FU mean anything to you?
We do not know what was breached, we're just informing you because we're providing that email address. We think it's not us, because then we'd have thousands of hits and we have, like, five. I am to advise you to change the passwords on all services everywhere, including now-defunct ones, where you used this email address. You will get this notification again when somebody sells the same database under a new name. Please be as vigilant as you should already always be.
Sorry about the trouble, have a nice day."
"As we all know, the best way for Joe Public to upgrade his computer is to throw away all the software he ever bought and spend the next three months trawling nerdy community sites trying to persuade short-tempered dweebs to tell him what command-line bollocks he needs to type in so that it will let him print."
In his defense, how good do you think the Linux install on a USB device sold by someone who won't even admit that's what it is will be? I am willing to bet that the person starting that up (assuming they can figure out how) is going to be faced with a very restricted environment which doesn't have drivers preinstalled or packages updated because that would take time. Nor will any of that be automatic because installing new things will fill up the tiny USB drive and the user might return it in time. They need it to look like it works long enough for the return window to close.
An establishment that I worked at had an issue with an aggressive homeless guy. He solicited for charity (well, charity towards him) in front of their premises, and they had him evicted. In revenge, this gentleman would crap on the front step, then wipe with the building corner.
As the lowest on the pecking order, I was the fellow who got to clean up the daily mess. After a few days, I appealed to my boss. He thought for a while, then asked me to show him where the wiping occurred. He brought out a container of pepper spray gel, and used it up on that corner.
The next morning was the last morning that I had the shit duty. I miss that boss, he was a good one.
I once had a SOS from my sister - someone had done their business near the garage - probably the night before on their way home from the pub...
I headed off to the local supermarket on the way and bought some cat litter. Poured that over the offending pile, then used two pieces of stiff cardboard and lifted it all off into a bin bag. Then used more cat litter to pick up the remaining. Only then used disinfectant on the area.
The clumping type of cat litter made of bentonite clay would be best.
A deep-fried thesaurus with a side of sugarcoated mushrooms (grown on natural sheep dung) and coffee with reflux - no better way to wake up. And indeed, your boss loves you when you shovel the shite your co-workers keep trailing behind them out in the dumpster. Not the best way to get popular with the latter, but you hated them anyway, so that's in fact two problems solved in one stroke - it's perfect to prevent unwanted friends you didn't need in the first place and keep the beer for yourself.
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