Keeping safe online

The threats – real and perceived

[First posted 10 September 2020; minor changes 21 June 2021]

Luckily, there’s plenty of advice and guidance available – often slanted particularly towards our demographic (ie oldies) …

Those two sites are particularly easy to follow and understand, but others are equally informative and targeted.

Your bank probably has guidance which it publishes online and which is accessible to everyone, not just their customers …

I’ll return to further information, guidance and references at the end of this post, but first we need to look at a few issues, discuss some terminology that’s widely used and try and tease out what’s really important, and what’s just an inconvenience and then it’s up to you to judge where you find yourself on the scale of …

Terrified -> Apprehensive -> Sensibly Aware -> Relaxed -> Unconcerned

First let’s distinguish the difference between online security and online privacy. These are two different issues which are however linked. Sometimes you have to relinquish some privacy to receive a service – unless you choose to pay for it (and I’ve long been an advocate of paying for services if they do a job that is necessary); exactly how much privacy are you prepared to relinquish?

Security on the other hand is an absolute – you should not be prepared to accept less than your very best efforts . We’ll deal with that in the third part of the post.

How do you relinquish your privacy, and how much of a loss of privacy is acceptable?

Some services could not be offered without income from adverts, or paid-for advertising – eg Facebook, Twitter and Instagram; and some eg Google and Amazon track and provide information to resellers if you don’t block them from doing so. As an example of how much value Google sees in getting knowledge of what you’re doing and where you’re doing it, they paid Apple $8bn recently to remain as the default search engine for any browser that’s running on an Apple device!

Incidentally, if you clicked on that link you might have been asked whether you wanted to accept cookies – what exactly are they, and what do they do. This article from Norton explains what they do quite well …

Essentially, they record what you do on a website so that when you return to it some of the settings are remembered and applied. Cookies do however also have a downside in that some can also act to track your activity once you’ve left the site. For that reason, you should disable in your browser the ability of third-parties to glean information from a cookie, and also to prevent them tracking your activity once you’ve left the site. You can at anytime, clear the cookies from your browser, and indeed on some internet browsers set them up to delete cookies when you leave (close the window) the site. The browser I use – Firefox – alerted me the first time I went to the site to the fact that Norton was using a Fingerprinting cookie itself …

Another thing you should consider is whether you want adverts to be shown, or not. You might get a request to enable adverts when you visit a site, the answer you supply will be held in a cookie in the browser – that’s how cookies work. Firefox, Brave and Microsoft Edge, by default, block most, if not all, adverts. These are often annoying and having a browser that blocks adverts, or if you use Chrome – using an ad-blocker like AdBlock Plus often makes for a more “pleasurable browsing experience” by limiting the intrusion you might feel upon your privacy.

Which brings us to browsers and search engines

Search engines are not created equal! Whilst Google is often thought to be the same as the internet and is often mistaken to be an internet browser itself, it is in fact just one of a range of possible search engines that you can use to look for information on the internet. It uses a platform called Chromium to display the results of its searches to you through a browser called Chrome. However, other browsers – Microsoft’s new Edge, Brave and Opera all use the same underlying Chromium technology – the difference being they don’t track what you’re doing “to present the content that most meets your needs” (Google’s philosophy) and in some cases (eg Brave) they can actually prevent tracking of your browsing history. For the reasons given above, I use either Brave or Firefox as my internet browser and I’m leaning more to the latter nowadays as it seems quicker and more secure as well.

So what safe and private search engine could you use as an alternative to Google. I use DuckDuckGo

… but others I could have used might have been Bing, Yahoo or another one you might choose from this article or the list of other articles at the end of it …

There are many specialist search engines (as explained in the above article) that can give you much better, and more targeted results than a broad-spectrum Google search.

Finally, no discussion of Privacy can ignore Social Media and Facebook in particular. These applications, if left to their own default settings, are effectively personal information mining engines. They grab what information they can from you, and sell it on to whoever is willing to pay for it; or are indeed the platform for data mining, vis the Cambridge Analytica affair.  Online retailers are not exempt from this and Amazon for instance has a wonderful record of your browsing history! Are you sure you know what it’s doing with that information? So look at this table taken from a recent Which? supplement – Staying Secure in a Digital World – and just check whether you need to change your settings if you use any Social Media apps …

So that’s Privacy dealt with.


Should you be frightened?

The take away message I want you to have is Frightened – no; cautious – yes!

Online banking is very secure – a recent survey in Which? produced the following scores …

… plus you are protected and most of the banks are increasingly opting to adopt an online and mobile guarantee to refund you where you’ve been the innocent victim of a fraud. Here for instance is Barclay’s “Online and Mobile Banking Guarantee.”

They really don’t want to shell out money, so they are trying to educate us to be wise to scams. So let’s take a scam test

Banks are also often supplying software free (or at reduced cost) for you to install to protect your machine, to protect you from fraud – and of course themselves from having to pay out! I was recently offered a piece of software called Malwarebytes by the NatWest and although I have an Apple Mac computer which are well known to be relatively secure from Viruses, Spyware, Trojans and other malware, I installed it. I was pleased to note that I didn’t have any malware on the machine.

Surprisingly you might think … it’s safer to use the mobile app on your phone, or tablet to do online banking and retail purchases than a web browser. This is because the app on the mobile device has to be verified by Google for Android (Google Play Store) or Apple for iOS/iPadOS (Apple Store). Whereas a browser could be infected, or compromised with malware. [That’s something I’ve learnt whilst preparing this post!!!]

When you’re out and about and NEED to do an online transaction from your mobile – use cellular rather than WiFi. The latter can be really open to “sniffers”. [I must admit I try to avoid doing online transactions when away from a domestic network.]

Whilst we’re at it, you might like to think about doing a Detox on your phone, and even consider installing Firefox as the browser of choice rather than Chrome (Android) or Safari (Apple) on your mobile device …

So we come to phishing and pharming, vishing and smishing – I kid you not! We’ll leave aside spear phishing because we’re not important enough for that – it’s used to target “corporations” and individuals within them! [Please excuse me not going into details on any of these. You can follow the links for further information.]

However the most scary scam I’ve been made aware of is one that befell a member of my family when they were distracted sufficiently to become the victim of SIM swapping.

I discussed this with the Cardiff U3A Computer Group last June and you can  read the updated post here.


What should you do to protect yourself?

Some of these pieces of advice are really quite straightforward, but some require some intervention by yourselves.

  • Keep your operating software up to date. This is particularly true if you’re a Windows user, and even more true if you are still running an older version of Windows than Windows 10. If you’re using Windows XP, Windows Vista or even Windows 7 you should seriously consider disconnecting your machine from the internet because even if you’ve got anti-malware software running this is probably not protecting you against the latest threats.
  • Install anti-malware, or anti-virus software, particularly if you’re a Windows user. Don’t pay more than you need to. Windows Defender from Microsoft is Free and for our demographic relatively undemanding and unsophisticated users, more than sufficient. Keep it up-to-date as well! [As I said previously, your bank might be offering free software as well.]
  • Keep the software you use regularly up to date as well. Consider removing any software from your machine that you don’t use – this is because software vulnerabilities are discovered sometimes quite a while after the software was first released. It will also save you disc space!
  • Be cautious over installing extensions into your browser. These are often extremely useful and valuable tools, ie password managers, Dropbox, note taking, Google Back up and Sync, but if you don’t get them from the official sources then you might be importing vulnerabilities, eg spyware and trojans to your system.
  • Very seriously consider logging-out from social media and other retail sites when you’ve finished using them, especially Facebook, you just don’t know what tracking and logging of what you do, even where you are, if you leave yourself logged in on a mobile device.
  • Free software is both a boon and a curse. Only download open source software from a reputable site such as Softpedia, and never try and get proprietary software for free. Read this article about Free download sites if you want to know more.
  • Remember the golden rule 1 – if it seems too good to be true, it probably is, so steer clear!
  • Remember the golden rule 2 – don’t speak to strangers (an oldie but goldie that one); in other words if you don’t know where an email has come from – ignore it; if the website address looks a little strange – do an internet search on the company or organisation to check if the address you’re looking at is a spoof of the proper one.
  • Have more than one email address. Use one as your personal address, then use other ones that you can “throw away”when you need to register to a website, but you’re unlikely ever to go back to it again. Or have an email address (UserID) specifically for online purchases. Splitting things like this reduces the risk of you being the victim of fraud.
  • Seriously consider using an email service that is NOT connected to your Internet Service Provider (ISP). If you decide to change your ISP, and you should review them periodically, then you will have real problems if your email address is linked to their service!
  • You’ve got Spam filters running? Of course you have – but you better check! Probably your ISP, or email provider (eg Gmail, Yahoo, Microsoft Outlook or Hotmail) is filtering out what it thinks is spam, but occasionally some gets through. If that’s the case then you can always look at the real sender of your message. Take a look at the examples below …

You can also apply filters to divert incoming email into different folders in your email system. That reduces the amount of Junk that you need to review. [I’ve also advocated using the “native” email application for your device rather than rely on the web-based service the email provider has. Thus on a Windows device – use Windows Mail (or Outlook); on a Mac use Mail. You can then easily synchronise your email between devices from multiple email accounts. Tidy!]

So we come to Passwords …

… this is the point at which you need to consider intervention and changing your behaviour! You might also need to do a fair bit of work, but it’s worth it if you want to have a secure internet experience.

Let’s just see what using an insecure Password can lay yourself open to. Type in the word Password, or ABC123 from the link above – frightening eh!?

The most common password I use – and I know I shouldn’t reuse the same password, but I am human – has not been discovered on any pwned site. Phew!

What about the combination of your email address with your password – has that been “pwned” (ie stolen through a data breach)? Try typing your email address into the link above.

Oh no! I’ve been pwned … but it was a long time ago and I’ve changed my password many times since then!
Ah! That’s better – my “throwaway” email and passwords are “safe”!

And if you want to see a list of which websites have been breached, it’s alarmingly long!

So … use a unique password for everywhere you sign on. There’s lots of tricks to achieve this; some of which I wrote about in a post quite a long time ago …

… but the real change of behaviour is to use a Password Manager – again I wrote about this a little while ago and linked it to using Two Factor Authentication, which is also covered in the same post …

Password managers

I use LastPass, but other common ones are Dashlane and 1Password. Please make up your own minds after reading some Reviews and seriously consider using one.


Slides from talk given to Bridgend U3A

Keeping safe online

Slides from talk given to Cardiff U3A

Staying safe online

References

These may not be available in your Public Library, hopefully that isn’t the case.

… but these are available … Which? webpages – Scams & older people

I seriously do recommend signing up for the Which? Scam Alert Service – sign up for an email alert – and I seriously recommend you NOT broadcasting other people’s warnings to you about scams; they could be old, they could be inaccurate, they could be scams in themselves.

Look on the Age UK webpages – Staying safe in your digital world and specifically How to stay safe online

Your bank will undoubtedly have Internet Security webpages. Mine has a Security Centre web presence and particularly they provide a number of Fraud Guides

I could give a million references to changing your privacy settings on Social Media, but here are a couple relating to Facebook, perhaps the most challenging service of the lot.

First – what Facebook unchallenged will want to get from you. You are able to disable (prevent) all or some of these … Sign up for Facebook – this is not sign-up site, it’s just one to educate you on the privacy you might give up without realising before you sign up (but of course you can run the checklist at any time); then How to change settings on Facebook and finally Securing Facebook: Keep your data safe with these privacy settings.

You, groups, flickr and privacy

Most of the time people join flickr to showcase their photos, to get faves, and to get comments (hopefully both positive and constructive) to enable them to improve their photography. The photos you upload are shown in your flickr Photostream (or Camera Roll) which you can browse and put into Albums. You can create your own Galleries of your (and other people’s) images; Fave images that appear in your Activity stream (see later) and Follow people whose photos you like.

We’ll start by looking at the default privacy settings you can apply to the images you upload. The Settings page is accessed from your profile tab …

… which gives you access to a page with these headings …

… clicking on Privacy and Permissions brings up this screen – from which you should first look at Defaults for new uploads

Read carefully the Note: “if you add something to a group pool, that group’s members will be able to view and add notes, comments or tags, regardless of privacy settings.” There’s no privacy within a group. All members of the group can see all members’ photos. If you’ve declared your image to have restricted viewing to Friends, or Family however they will not be visible for public viewing in the group, even though the group page might be visible for public viewing.

After uploading your photos they will (unless you’ve changed the default settings) appear by default in the Activity stream which you can access from the flickr logo …

… from which you will also be able to see the images of the people and groups you follow. This is the default view when you open Flickr on a mobile device.

Any photo you fave is then attached to your account so that you can return to view it on a later occasion.

It is also possible – unless you’ve prevented it – for someone to download the photo, or add it to their own Photostream as their own! You might wish to check your settings to prevent that happening.

… and …

… so it’s important that you know what you’re doing when you follow someone – I certainly wouldn’t recommend the default setting of “Anyone”.

There are occasions however when you might wish to keep your photos completely private, or to share them privately within a Group. The settings in flickr to allow this are not exactly as intuitive as they might be so this post continues by seeking to help understand how you can “hide” your photos from the Public photostream, but to show them within a Group. Let’s start there.

Groups can either be Public, open to invited membership (or upon application to join) and then also to be Private. Note especially carefully the note attached to Invite-Only Group which can be either Public or Private … “Anyone can view an Invite-Only group page …”

The last case is obviously the most restrictive and in this situation a Group is setup by a Flickr member and they invite either existing Flickr members, or non-members to join the group.

They will be sent an invite to join flickr, and the Group, as a member. You can therefore appreciate that you have to be a flickr member to view Photos which are in a Group. However if they’re not hidden from the Activity Stream by changing the default privacy settings (as above) and if it isn’t a Private group – they’ll still be visible to anyone unless you’ve also changed your search profile …

For the Invite-Only Group which has not been declared Private it is important to note that anyone (even non-Flickr members) can view the group page, so as we shall next, if you want your photos to be completely invisible to the outside world, you’ll have to do something else to make them invisible!!

If you want to keep your photos visible only to members of a Group, you need to specify on the Default privacy settings page either “Your friends”, or “Your family” depending upon the nature of the Group; similarly you should restrict Comments (and Notes, Tags and People) to “Your friends and family”.

However these settings will then apply to every image that you upload and that might be more privacy than you really want, so you are able to choose the level of privacy on an image by image basis after you’ve uploaded them. This is done by looking at the information attached to an image after you’ve clicked on it in your Photostream …

… so, as an alternative, you could leave your Photostream relatively open using settings similar to the ones in the screenshots above and then restrict viewing of individual photos to Friends, or Family, etc. within Groups.

I hope this helps.

Great new Plugin from Ordnance Survey for Mapping Trails

I’ve been using a WordPress Plugin called OS OpenSpace Maps for quite a while that allows the mapping of trails (I use .gpx format to record the trails) onto an OS Map.

This has worked well, but in updating a blog post I came across the information that the Ordnance Survey has produced a new plugin that works with their DataHub Maps service. This is an even better service and if you’re a low-use user, you can upgrade to the Premium level subscription to get 1:25,000 scale maps.

The map can be easily zoomed and can be clicked to take to full screen size.

Here are a couple of links to help you along the way of installing and using the plugin.

The Plugin Page on WordPress – https://wordpress.org/plugins/os-datahub-maps/

Using the OS Maps API (which you have to obtain after creating an account – https://osdatahub.os.uk/docs/wmts/overview

A guide to using the plugin – https://skirridsystems.co.uk/wordpress-plugins/os-datahub-maps/

Really neat!

 

Using a Password Manager and implementing Two Factor Authentication

Introduction – passwords, passwords, passwords.

Log in to your e-mail account. Log in to your bank account. Log in to Facebook, WhatsApp or twitter. Log in to your Amazon account, or any other retail site. Log in to your photo sharing service. Log in to Thought grazing, or any other membership based organisation eg U3A, Which?

 

Is it possible to remember the number of applications you use on a regular basis that require a password? How do you keep track of all of all those passwords?

Here are a few tricks you might have tried or considered (with hints about why you may want to steer clear of some of them):

    • Memorise passwords. This is a great technique if you use your passwords every day, but maybe not for those you only need occasionally. If you don’t use a password regularly, there’s a good chance you could forget it if you rely on your memory alone. In addition, Web browser cookies can remember your login session for days or weeks at a time, meaning you only enter the password manually once in a while even if you use it every day. This could therefore be a weakness and security breach if someone stole your computer. So to login to your computer, or connect to your bank this might be the best approach, but be mindful of the potential security breaches and use for only a limited number of uses. [NB The login credentials to your bank are not saved on your computer, but other sites may well store them in cache or cookies to make it “easier” for you to connect!]

 

    • Use the same password everywhere. Memorising a single password for every account does make life simpler. For security reasons, though, this isn’t a great idea, because it makes it easy for a hacker who finds your user name and password for one account to break into your other accounts, too. So what you could do is have a base (root) password that is the same, and then add something you believe you’ll remember to identify the pairing of the password with the site (a variable). Thus making the password unique to that site. So if you wanted to connect to Boots the Chemist you might choose “B00ts&” before your root password. I gave some ideas on choosing a root password in an earlier post.

 

    • Write passwords down on paper. This is an ideal solution if you can hide the written information where no one else has access and you can remember where that place is :-). However not only is this a risk if someone finds the list, but a written list or an assortment of scraps of paper could also be lost or damaged, and you’ll need to find and update the list each time you update a password. This is most definitely the most frequently chosen option, and most certainly is the worst option too.

 

    • Write passwords into a file on your computer or mobile device. This is less likely to get lost than the paper, but you do risk losing the file if you have hardware failure. In addition, this file is as vulnerable to hackers as other files on your computer. You could encrypt it for an added layer of security, which makes this strategy similar to the next solution. I used this option for a while with the file saved on Dropbox and protected by a Password, so it was safe from loss – but it wasn’t encrypted and most definitely wasn’t very safe – but it was a safer option than the previous method.

 

    • Use password management software. Password management software is a utility you can use to save and retrieve all your passwords. This software could be a standalone application on your local computer or a feature within another application (such as your browser) – or both. This option greatly limits hackers’ possible routes to your password data while adding convenient features for organising and retrieving information. This is the strategy that is strongly recommended for everyone and for use on a single computer – it can be FREE.

When I sat down to write this piece, I obviously looked around to see whether there was any information I could reference. After I’d done that, it was clear that there was no point in me re-inventing the wheel. So I point you at this excellent introduction to Password Managers and review of the leading Password Managers out there. Read it before you go any further!.

Password managers – how do they work? Are they safe?

So you’ve read the article mentioned above? Yes – then proceed. Otherwise I really do insist you go back and read it.

So now you know there are browser-based password managers, cloud-based password managers and locally-stored password managers. You do know that, don’t you? If not, go back and read this article again!

Are they safe? – you only have to remember ONE password, the master password, and that unlocks your Password Vault. So compared with unsafe, easy to guess passwords, or scraps of paper – they are very safe; and you can’t lose them, forget them, or mislay them. They’re all in one place!

How do they work? – well, I don’t need to tell you much about this because you’ve already read this, haven’t you? Essentially, you can choose to let the Password Manager generate random passwords for every site you need to provide login credentials for, or you can provide the Password Manager with a password when prompted. I tend to do the latter using the “variable + root” approach I discussed before. It’s not that I don’t trust my Password Manager, it’s just that for many of the sites that I use frequently, it’s quicker and easier for me to supply the password because I can remember it!

Which Password Manager you choose to use is down to your situation – you could read this Review of Password Managers – which picks Dashlane and LastPass as best products. Either of these would be good to implement and use but they have different use cases. I use LastPass and pay a small amount annually so that I can use it on more than one device. I also use it because as it’s cloud-based, I can log into my LastPass account from any machine and access my online services. Dashlane lets you make the choice of local machine or cloud-based password storage – but it is not free, whilst Keepass (which is open source and free) works on a single machine, the passwords are stored on that machine – so that might be the option for you. If you only tend to use a laptop or desktop for browsing websites where you need to provide Login credentials, the free version of LastPass or KeePass is more than adequate.

Note: I do not recommend for the reasons explained in the article, that you use the Password Managers contained in your browser.

How do you use your Password Manager?

This is really beyond the scope of this article but elements of usage are covered in the two articles that have been referenced above. You should refer to the documentation for your chosen Password Manager.

What’s all the fuss about Two-factor Authentication then? Do I really need it if I’m using a Password Manager?

Well yes you do! It’s bandit country out there on the Internet. You’ll know  that if you’ve been on Have I been pwned? and seen your email address has been captured by a leak, or a hack. So it’s always possible that someone has got at least part of your login credentials, and from that it might be possible for them to request a new password – blocking you from using a service – or they may have even requested a new userid!  So that’s where 2FA comes in.

What is it though?

Essentially once you’ve implemented 2FA you’ll be asked for secondary information about yourself (Face-ID, or Touch-ID if you’re using an iPhone) or confirmation that you are the person you’re purporting to be – by asking you to supply a code that is displayed on a smartphone or other device you own, and which is to hand. Thus having your UserID and Password is not sufficient alone to access your account.

If you’ve used Online Banking recently you’ll have noticed they’ve implemented 2FA widely. In fact I believe they’ve been required to by the Banking Regulator. Thus accessing your bank from your device is intrinsically safer now than it used to be.

I’m not going to say much more about 2FA , I’m going to refer you again to a Guide rather than repeat the information myself – and quite possibly make a mistake in doing that. There are a number of sources of reference out there, from Google, Apple, Microsoft but the one that I’m pointing you at is this one which I think explains things well, and also points at how to implement it for a number of popular and well-used platforms and services.

Making life easier with an Authenticator for 2FA

Wouldn’t it be nice – instead of waiting for the site you are trying to access to send you a code to type into the box they’ve provided – if you could just look at your phone and see a code on it that you could then provide and type in?

That’s what an Authenticator does. Perhaps the best known is Google Authenticator – and that’s the one I use on my iPhone, but there are others. You might consider using LastPass Authenticator for instance, I’ve meant to try it out for quite a while, and there’s also Authy, which has significant advantages over Google Authenticator – but it’s perhaps best to get experience using the Google software first.

And that’s it! Thanks for getting to the bottom of this long article. I promise you, if you follow the advice and guidance included in it, and in the referenced articles, your online life will be much safer, more secure and your stress levels will be reduced!

What gender is a computer?

I’d like to thank a U3A member for sharing this with me and suggesting others might like to see it – not only as a light-hearted but also as a challengingly true piece of computer-related education (?)

It could be it’s an old video, and you’ve seen it before, but at least it’s not a Covid-19 meme!