Naked (Sex Crimes, Drugs, Murder, Betrayal, and Dark Conspiracies) Security

Call me a cynic, but experience hath shown that most folks will at least give a glance at a post with a title like the one shown above. In fact, most of them will devour such posts, even if the content:

1. Contains no actual facts
2. Has no relevance—directly or indirectly—to their lives

But if the post's content has huge, massive, humongous, enormous, direct relevance to their lives — by which I mean the security of their personally identifiable information, their privacy, and the sanctity of the property in their communications with others, I suspect that most of them will yawn, shrug, and quickly go on the hunt for some content about sex crimes, drugs, murder, betrayal and dark conspiracies.

Which is why I decided to forgo the real title of this post: "Your Helpful Security Awareness Reminder". No one's going to read something with a title like that. But fear the heck not! Please stay tuned for the sex crimes, drugs, murder, betrayal and dark conspiracies parts, which are coming up shortly.

But first, this message from our sponsor:

People of Earth:

Every once in a while I "recommend" that y'all subscribe to Sophos NakedSecurity. I'm changing my recommendation to something more akin to a plea. Signing up is free, and they won't send you spam. Instead, you'll get a Monday-thru-Friday daily digest of their articles about security and privacy. Most of them are written for the non-geek (you and me), although I usually learn something even from the occasional technical article. (There's always more to learn...er, right?)

I know what you're thinking: "You're nuts, Vito. It's not 'free'. It will cost me the time it takes to read it." Right. But look at it this way: The time it takes to just visually scan the daily digest (less than a minute) to decide what articles you want to read is itself a reminder that you should be mindful of privacy and security, and doing the basics:

Run a good anti-virus program.

Back up at least once per day.

Don't click on links in emails unless you absolutely trust the source, and never without inspecting the link first.

Never, ever, forward an email that tells you to "forward this to everyone you know".

Set your cookies permissions for "this session only", and quit/exit your browser app (SeaMonkey, Firefox, Safari, Internet Explorer, ...etc.) when you're done browsing.

Subscribe to NakedSecurity and follow their recommendations.

And if you still aren't convinced that it's more than worth the time it takes to read it and follow its advice, let me just mention "ransomware", wherein some scumbag installs malware that encrypts everything on your computer and then extorts you for hundreds of dollars to provide you with the decryption key.  What's it worth to not have to deal with that?

For me, the biggest and most consistent value in having the NakedSecurity newsletter show up in my Inbox every Monday thru Friday is the fact that it reminds me, "Oh, right...security & privacy. Gotta remember that!" It's easy to forget, to get sloppy, to say "I don't have time for this now...", but do you have time to clean up the mess if someone steals your identity, or hijacks your computer, or wipes out everything on your hard drive, or...well, you get the idea.

I need a reminder every day, and NakedSecurity gets the job done. It works for me, anyway. I'll bet it will work for you. 

Devotedly,

Vito  

And now, for all the sex crimes, drugs, murder, betrayal, and dark conspiracies that you could possibly want, simply Google for any of those terms and you'll have more than you can stomach.