Security Begins @ Homeport

Lee Davis

It’s time to change your pattern of behavior on the World Wide Web. With the internet in its’ new incarnation (Web 2.0), the case for hyper-connectivity is being made not only by the megabyte, but by the millisecond. Resultant trends spawned via inter-personal communications technologies (instant messaging, Skype, P2P networks) made it easier than ever for the world to re-experience individual to individual connection, made boundless despite the seeming barriers of language, hyper-planetary geography, or even the distinction of the notion of existence itself. And with this rebirth of one-to-one immersion, there come (as usual) the bad-attitude mongers and personal shine-stealers; a raft of low-life digital piracy ass-fractiousness thriving on a chaotic, quicksand-shifty, low-grade variant of semiotics tuned to the base signal of the human computer. Digital spammers and scammers, wi-fi hijackers, hackers & crackers, account-phishing spoofers, Viagra-pushing tooters, and stock tip pdf scam boosters all attempting to infiltrate your computer to take away the joy of what should be a digital vacation.

I would think that you’d be angry, enough to try and stop this, but you give away your power EVERYDAY, and to the less than fit. The “others” – the political system that soaks up money through agreements that were struck before your realm of existence (so theoretically you’re immune from the responsibility of any of it; at least, that’s how I see it for myself). The corporations, with their ever-increasing rapaciousness in their planet-ravaging quest unto increased dividend-per-shareholder maximization paradigms, continue an aggressively intrusive push into the heart of popular culture, and blatantly try to profit off our unspoken affinities, hopes, and emotions. Just another day at the office. The idea of cyber-privacy is a rapidly vanishing concept (soon to be gone in as little as 10-15 years at conservative estimates – observing China’s humorous current attempts to “control” the internet. But don’t chuckle TOO much, you know, because they DO have the technology and capability of blasting satellites out of orbit so the internet thing may not be too much of an obstacle if they really set the national political mind to deal with it) but it isn’t too late to cultivate the tools that will allow you to have a peace-of-mind digital experience.

These vermin only ever win because of the fact that YOU LET THEM! How many times have you gotten something that you KNEW was an outright scam, but you e-flushed it and went on to hurriedly crack open a Bratz or Polly Pocket online membership (lol!)? Did you bother to at least find out what domain it claimed to be from and then tried to contact the webmaster of the domain or at least the ISP to notify them that someone was running scams over their servers?

YOU have to take PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY when dealing with the issue of your internet safety and the overall quality of your online experience. With the level of network sophistication and current abilities of remote connections from any computer anywhere on the internet, it’s all-too-possible that hidden threats are lurking around each and every corner.

Recently I got an email communication from a very well-known corporation (whose name I’m DEFINITELY withholding for evident reasons) who divulged that there may have been a security breach on their servers and some confidential information (i.e. service subscribers direct contact information and demographic classifications – super spammer jackpot!) may have been compromised
(i.e. downloaded to outside IPs). In fact, I’d been unsubscribed from that corporations’ online service for a number of months, but the fact that even non-users had to be notified of the security breach (therefore attesting to the fact that my contact information is still in a database in their system – even if it is marked “unsubscribed”, and therefore proving the fallacy of the unsubscribe policy of the modern digital corporation) was made even more incredulous by the (paraphrased) letter submission mailer sent out via mass-mailer;

Dear Valued Customer,

Protecting those who use our website is a top priority, and we value the trust you place in us. Regrettably, opportunistic criminals are increasingly using the Internet for illegitimate purposes. As is the case with many companies that maintain large databases of information, we're from time to time subject to attempts to illegally extract information from our database. As you may be aware, our database was recently the target of malicious activity that involved the illegal downloading of information such as names, addresses, phone numbers, and email addresses for some of our users posted on our sites. We responded to this specific incident by conducting a comprehensive review of internal processes and procedures, notified those users that their contact records had been downloaded illegally, and shut down a rogue server hosting these records.

The Company has determined that this incident is not the first time its’ database has been the target of criminal activity. Due to the significant amount of uncertainty in determining which individual users may have been impacted, Company felt that it was in your best interest to take the precautionary steps of reaching out to you and all users regarding this issue. Company believes illegally downloaded contact information may be used to lure users into opening a "phishing" email that attempts to acquire financial information or lure users into fraudulent financial transactions. This has been the case in similar attacks on other websites.

Now, this is coming from a company that probably has a few hundred thousand (if not a couple of million) dollars invested in the security of their networks and the information therein. For them to be raided in an organized, PROFESSIONAL manner because they possess valuable 1s & 0s should be a sobering indication of what’s at stake in the realm of personal information, cyber-security, computing freedom issues, and ever-encroaching threats to all three. What this SHOULD then mean, is that the digital seas are only going to get more treacherous in the coming decades, and to all of you who leave yourselves unprotected and oblivious to all the potential carnage roaming around just looking for a virgin-clean o/s to open up a can of whoop-ass on. Re-educate yourself. These threats depend on the fact that people who are just looking to stay in touch with their loved ones, share pics, movies and etc. with their friends/families, help their kids get a leg up in the educational realm, and so on, have NO TIME to be on the research for the knowledge to stay one step ahead of or invisible to those looking to wreak digital havoc on extremely non-digital folk.

I mean, no one wants to think of themselves as susceptible to near - Pavlovian influencibility when it comes to all the digital shenanigans transpiring at any given time in any multitude of number of places. But the rates of escalation of aggressive intrusion tactics that help to sour the whole online vibe are a reason to vigilantly resolve to reclaim a peace-of-mind akin to the ’80s (when cyber-crime was a fringe element).

YOUR part in the struggle begins at home (port). The best way to protect yourself is to obviously safeguard your computer and the way it functions on the internet, or what communications it receives and from where; MONITOR. Keep your eyes open for things that don’t make sense to you, and don’t be afraid to trust your instincts. If that email mail subject line has no rational language connection structure – DON’T open it. That’s what the Delete function is for. Risks from unsolicited emails can net you viruses and other nasty infections that can crash/kill your machine (and, it’d really hurt to lose those precious baby pics off your hard-drive – BACK IT UP!!!!! You’ll thank me, honest.).

What I recommend is one of two ways of reading emails besides off your machine client (i.e. Outlook, Outlook Express – if you’re traveling IE7), to void potentially dangerous email before it ever gets to your computer. First, you could have your ISP’s web version of the email program. The obvious benefit of this is that there is guaranteed virus/spyware/etc protection keeping any potentially dangerous replicating programs from automatically executing. The other way is to log on to where your ISP keeps your mail on the server, and preview the email before it ever gets to your computer. Security. But it doesn’t come by itself. You have to MANUFACTURE it.

And once acquired, you must MAINTAIN it. Yes. You have to do a daily or weekly (depending on your schedule and frequency of machine usage) security sweep of your FULL system. Anti-virus, anti-spyware, rootkit detectors, keylogger detectors, and so on, and so on. And the threats are seemingly multiplied daily.

Help protect your email address book (no matter whose mail program is used), since it’s a favorite of worms and other malicious mail replication viral infection programs and will help to quickly spread viruses to everyone in your list. ALWAYS keep the first entry as follows; AAAAAAA@AAAAAAA. This does two things; 1) keeps a mail virus/worm from being able to replicate itself to your list since they work alphabetically until they mail themselves to the whole thing. They get themselves “stuck on stupid” since it’s a non-deliverable address and it helps with point 2) which is since it repeatedly tries to mail itself to the undeliverable address, your mail program will freeze or keep trying, which alerts you to the fact that there is virus/worm and allows you to take the necessary actions.

A few other things you can do to reclaim your internet experience are to encrypt your online communications activity (especially of a sensitive personal/financial nature), setup your email so that you’re receiving from those you trust, and if you do business from it, setup your blocked senders list (which will block individuals/domains) and maintain a safelist for all your business contacts.

Any messages you deem as important in helping you to run your daily online activities should be saved as html files so that if you have to reformat your computer due to a virus and the ONLY resort is that erase your current o/s drive and reinstall the program, you lose the functionality of your mail client and your stored emails (happened to me too many times to actually count. Info I was hoarding that I’ll never find again). Another essential key to overall security is complete machine maintenance at regular intervals (and, again, depending on machine usage, daily to weekly). This is where the concept of tweak comes in. The idea is to keep your machine at the highest performance standard possible in all areas of operations at all times. And as an author-based side note, I’d like to remind you to document all settings that relate to anything you may try. You’re advised to proceed with caution and have an alternate plan if an implementation yields unexpected results (you can’t say you haven’t been warned).

About The Author
Mr. Lee Davis is the Webmaster/Owner of TKY_IMP, a brand-new website (launching May 19th, 2008) devoted to stress-relief, info-tainment, and other issues related to the Internet Marketing niche. Website can be found at the URL
http://tomorrowsknowledgeyesterday.110mb.com/index.php (or for those of you who need a more compacted address, http://tinyurl.com/2fdoba ).