Tag Archives: Internet security

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Future Crimes by Marc Goodman

Marc Goodman’s Future Crimes: Everything is Connected, Everyone is Vulnerable and What We Can Do About It (Doubleday, $30), is a must-read.  Goodman has spent a career in law enforcement and technology, including serving as a futurist-in-residence with the FBI.

Future Crimes exposes the ways criminals, corporations and countries are using new and emerging technologies against you – and how this makes you more vulnerable than you ever imagined.

Here are two excerpts that stand out:

If you don’t own and control your own online persona, it’s extremely easy for a criminal to aggregate the known information about you and use it for a wide variety of criminal activity, ranging from identity theft to espionage. Indeed, there are many such examples of this occurring, especially for high-profile individuals.

The more data you produce, the more organized crime is happy to consume. Many social media companies have been hacked, including LinkedIn (6.5 million accounts), Snapchat (4.6 million names and phone numbers), Google, Twitter and Yahoo. Transactional crime groups are responsible for a full 85% of those data breaches, and their goal is to extract the greatest amount of data possible , with the highest value in the cyber underground.

In 2013, the data broker Experian mistakenly sold the personal data of nearly two-thirds of all Americans to an organized crime group in Vietnam. The massive breach occurred because Experian failed to do due diligence.

Goodman concludes Future Crimes with an appendix of tips that will help readers avoid more than 85 percent of the digital threats that they face each day. (Turning off your computer at night is one.)  Reading the book will help you understand why they are so important.

 
 
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The Petraeus crisis became one because of common digital mistakes made by the parties involved.

Knowing how to ensure your emails remain private – and are not stored on servers or your smart phone forever – is an important part of Internet security. Concealing your computer’s IP address is also important.

Technology journalist Nicole Perlroth shared these and other tips this week in her Times article, Trying to Keep Your E-Mails Secret When the C.I.A. Chief Couldn’t. Here are three key takeaways:

How to Conceal Your Computer’s IP Address

Concealing your IP address is the single most important aspect of taking ownership over your online privacy.  Tor is a free, downloadable tool that conceals the IP address of computers. It prevents online providers from:

– knowing who you are, where you browse on the Internet and seeing inside your encrypted traffic as it is relayed to your banking site or to e commerce stores.

– watching your traffic, injecting their own advertisements into your traffic stream, and recording your personal details.

IT assistance is necessary to download and configure TOR.  It also has a set of guidelines that must be used to ensure it always works, so there is a bit of a learning curve.  If you want to research other companies that provide IP protection, Anonymizer is a program we like.

Encrypt your smart phone messages & delete them from storage

Wickr is an app that deletes all meta data from your pictures, video and audio files, like your device info, your location, and any personal information captured during the creation of those files.

Wickr provides:

– military-grade encryption of text, picture, audio and video messages

– sender-based control over who can read messages, where and for how long

– secure file shredding features

Protect your Gmail account from being searchable

“Choose the “off the record” feature on Google Talk, Google’s instant messaging client, which ensures that nothing typed is saved or searchable in either person’s Gmail account,” advises Perlroth.