“Catch Me If You Can“ Thief Says Facebook Users At Risk

Frank Abagnale, the conman portrayed by Leonardo DiCaprio in Steven Spielberg's film, Catch Me If You Can, says that children in particular need to be made aware of the serious risks of unwittingly revealing information on social networking sites. He has now been working for the FBI for over 40 years and has become cognizant of many widely available techniques to gather dangerous amounts of personal data from Facebook. Here’s a sampling of his advice.

• Don’t leave the Facebook app open on your smartphone because a virus can allow you to be tracked even if your phone is not transmitting.
• Never use a passport-style photo as a profile picture.
• Also, never tell someone the date of your birth and where you were born – that gives a thief 98% of what they need to steal your identity.

Fraudware Scam

During the doldrums of winter, many people decide to clean up their computer and take care of possible security issues. Just be careful that you don’t, in a fit of trying to “take care of business,” respond to one of those messages that pops up on your screen inviting you to buy a security program. While your brain tells you it is a rip-off, that part of you that wants to “get it over with” may download the “free” program (that you end up paying for), and as a result you find you have a piece of fraudware instead. Once you have it, you’ll know because no matter how many times you run the program it will always find the same problems and keep trying to get more money out of you. Once you have fraudware, running a real antivirus program probably won't help. To stop the pop-ups, you must run an anti-spyware program. There are a number of good ones — try starting with Ad-Aware.

Online Shoppers Targeted By Cybergangs

Holiday shopping time is a great time for cybercriminals. So, what can you do to stay safe?

• Browser update: Make sure you are running the most recent version of your Web browser. Outdated browsers without the latest security update can leave your computer vulnerable to viruses.

• Social-media scams: Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and other social networks are littered with unsafe Web links for bogus "shopping deals" and "coupons." IF it looks too good to be true, it probably is.

• Going mobile: If you shop on your smartphone, pay attention to where you put your sensitive personal information. Cybercriminals can hack into text messages and e-mails to grab banking and shopping account information.

Password Paranoid

It is absurdly easy to have your passwords hacked. Hackers are looking for passwords they can sell for $20 a pop and they have the tools to do it like John the Ripper, a free password-cracking program that use lists of commonly used passwords from breached sites and can test millions of passwords per second. So, what can you do about it? We’ve run some columns on this site about it and there was a recent article in The New York Times, entitled How to Devise Passwords That Drive Hackers Away, full of, yet, more including how to ignore security questions and a suggestion for using one browser for ‘promiscuous’ browsing ( i.e. – for everything you consider unimportant) and using another for online banking, etc. which you keep shut down unless in use. Take a few minutes and review your password situation as everyone gets hacked at some point.

Facebook Has New Email to Report Phishing

Facebook has launched a new e-mail address for users to report scams. The address, [email protected], can be used to report malicious e-mails by anyone, even those who aren’t on the network. The e-mail address was set up to combat a growing problem facing social networks from scammers who try to piggyback on the companies’ brands to trick unsuspecting people into giving up their log-in credentials. Many people use the same passwords across multiple services, meaning the scams often prove lucrative when criminals try logging in to banking and other Web sites.

Watch Out for Olympics Related Scams

Consumers need to be sure they are dealing with authorized partners of the Olympics to be sure they aren’t being scammed. Scammers are out in full force to take advantage of the Olympic buzz including planting malicious links and viruses in Olympics-themed photos that appear in search engine results. Experts advise consumers to avoid clicking on links directly and urge consumers to type a company's name into a search engine in order to get to its official website.

New Anti-Cyberbullying Law Passed in New York

New York Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo signed a bill into law recently, requiring that schools do more to crack down on cyberbullying. The law will go into full effect a year from now. Under the measure, schools are required to take additional steps to monitor and report such incidents. Lawmakers initially considered including harsher penalties punishing those who engage in cyberbullying, but that provision was ultimately removed. While New York courts have given school districts some leeway on the issue of cyberbullying done off versus on campus, there are still First Amendment issues that have to be resolved by the Supreme Court about a student’s right to free speech and what a school’s role is in incidents that happen both on and off campus.

Services to Keep Your Passwords Safe

Ok – we all know that we should generate a different password for every site that requires them, make them long and strong, mix in odd characters, and avoid pet names, but let’s face it, they are hard to remember and trying to keep them straight is a nightmare.  I have previously recommended that you use password management software, but USA Today recently featured an article with four services that can help you end playing the “guess the password” game and make your life a whole lot simpler.

Are We Doomed?

It seems like identity theft and cybercrime are always looming. My local police department, yet again, devoted their entire newsletter this week to the subject, and it is a topic that is always there in the background every time I sign up for anything online. But if you really want to be shocked into starting to think more about this issue, read Shelly Palmer’s column on Cyberwar 1.0: China vs The USA … We’re in trouble! As Palmer points out, China is home to some of the most dangerous hackers in the world, some of whom may be government recruited or sponsored, and while America’s high tech community is one of the best in the world, that group is not in charge of cybersecurity. Instead it is American civil servants, whose digital skill sets perfectly positioned them for government work versus Chinese hackers, who are government-sponsored, highly paid (in relative terms) and fully incentivized. Is Palmer being an alarmist? Not really. Cybersecurity is something that everyone talks about, but not much is done in a collective fashion.

The Future of Money in a Mobile Age

When I use the Starbucks app on my smart phone to pay for a cup of tea in the morning, I often think how convenient it is and wonder when our wallets will become unnecessary as long as we have our phones. Now, the folks at the Pew Internet and American Life Project have done a survey on just that subject and their findings are fairly predictable. Many people (65%) surveyed said that the security, convenience, and other benefits of “mobile wallet” systems will lead to widespread adoption of these technologies for everyday purchases by 2020.  Others—including some who are generally positive about the future of mobile payments—expect this process to unfold relatively slowly due to a combination of privacy fears, a desire for anonymous payments, demographic inertia, a lack of infrastructure to support widespread adoption, and resistance from those with a financial stake in the existing payment structure.