Cybersecurity

Today when the average person searches for something on the internet they use Google. After all Google was a search engine first before it became a giant data corporation. There are pros and cons to using Google's services. First is Google's business model. First and foremost Google is a data company. In contrast to a company such as Mozilla. Google's business model has never been a commitment to user privacy and stores every move its users make so that it can aggregate that data into useful services and monetize it. That can lead to a problem when a user would like to run internet searching for information that they expect to not be stored in a profile. That is where the search engine DuckDuck go comes in. DuckDuck go claims that they don't store your information ever. I am a big fan of the DuckDuck go privacy model. I understand the place for data and what Google does with data is certainly impressive. Yet sometimes I feel more comfortable with the piece of mind tha...

There are a number of factors that set Signal by Open Whisper Systems apart from any other encrypted messaging platform. The first being that it is open source. https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android Signal uses e-to-e encryption or end-to-end. Next, given that it is open source anyone can analyse the code for back-doors and the strength of the encryption. The celebrity whistle blower Edward Snowden  https://twitter.com/Snowden  endorses Signal and so do many IT professionals who report on controversial subjects. Even if the company is subpoenaed Signal retains nearly nothing on the user.  https://www.theverge.com/2016/10/4/13161026/signal-subpoena-court-order-encryption-police-open-whisper Signal is showing up in mainstream more all the time. https://www.wired.com/story/signal-encrypted-messaging-features-mainstream/ Security can even be improved upon the default settings with a few tweaks of the app settings. https://theintercept.com/2016/07/02/s...

I've been hearing more and more about cases where the scammers are getting hacked by the good guys. The BBC facebook page put this video up that I find very interesting for example. https://www.facebook.com/bbcnews/videos/289623162011871/ The podcast Hacking Humans  has twice reported on hackers replacing the automatic message in scam calls. https://thecyberwire.com/podcasts/hacking-humans/87/notes https://thecyberwire.com/podcasts/hacking-humans/86/notes The YouTube channel by Jim Browning has been working on this topic for a while too. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBNG0osIBAprVcZZ3ic84vw/featured https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xb_rgQ4IDS8&feature=youtu.be It's thrilling to see a means to get back at scammers and to see how relentless they can be. I am a huge fan of a feature I have on my Pixel 2 phone by Google called 'call screen'. A demo is seen at the URL below. https://support.google.com/phoneapp/answer/9118387?hl=en Basically if I don...

Apparently passwords based on something you have will eventually be history. It does seem that the more reasonable solution could be to base most authentication on something you are. USA Today wrote an article about where passwords are going. https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2020/02/28/data-breaches-hackers-passwords/4870309002/