Phishing, Vishing, and Spam
Urgency is the tell. Your bank will happily let you hang up and call the number on the back of the card. A vishing caller cannot afford to let you do that, so they will not.
Topic
Explainer
A collection of 45 issues
Our vehicles are spying on us.
A modern car is a phone on wheels that you cannot factory reset. It records where it went, and it remembers the phones plugged into it — including the rental you dropped off last week.
What is Doxxing?
Harassment campaigns rarely start with a hack. They start with a search — a name, an old address, an employer, a photo with a street sign in it — assembled by anyone willing to spend an afternoon on it.
Virtual Private Network (VPN)
A VPN does not make you anonymous. It moves the question of who gets to watch your traffic away from the coffee shop and your carrier, and onto one company you have decided to trust. Choose that company carefully.
Domain Naming Service (DNS)
A VPN protects what you send. It does not always cover the question you asked first — which site, and where does it live. Whoever answers that lookup decides where your browser actually lands.
Browser Fingerprinting
Delete every cookie you own and the site still recognizes you. Time zone, screen, browser settings and the versions of software you happen to run add up to something close enough to a name.
Password Managers
Recycling one password across accounts means a single breach opens all of them. A manager trades that problem for one very good master key — a real trade, and worth understanding before you make it.
Password Cards
A password you carry in your wallet, written down in plain sight, and still useless to whoever picks it up. The card is random; the route you take through it is the part you memorize.
Data: The Aggregation of Our Lives
Type a name you know into FastPeopleSearch and look at what comes back. That reaction is the whole argument. The harder question is where a site like that got any of it in the first place.
Multi-Factor Authentication
A leaked password stops being an emergency the moment something else stands behind it. The real decision is whether that second factor lives on the phone in your pocket or on a key next to it.