The Rayban scam is doing the rounds again, don’t click any friends’ updates where there’s an offer of cheap sunglasses, I mean come on, look at the weather.
Some people imagine hackers sitting typing in passwords one after the other until they get into your account, this is not what hackers trying to break into a person’s account do, Indeed, those same people who say “I’ve been hacked” are usually guilty of one of three things:
- They inadvertently installed malware known as a key logger, which captures everything they type and sites they visit and sends it to a third party surreptitiously
- They have been conned into handing over their security credentials (username, password, PIN etc) by an attacker using social engineering tricks.
- They have used a simple or easily guessable p@ssw0rd, like ILuvYou, 1234567890 or a pet name or obvious date that is mentioned in their updates and on their profiles…
It’s almost inevitable that some trick or scam will catch each and every one of us eventually as the criminals are almost always one step ahead of antivirus updates and security alerts. Just make sure you don’t fall for the oldest tricks in the book. If you want more details email me your current email username and password and I will check that your system is secure…hah…see what I did there?
Oh, there is, of course, a fourth way in which you might easily see your logins compromised and that is when the online service providers fail to keep their systems secure and somebody breaks into their servers and steals all their data. If your service provider has any decency they will not store data irrelevant to your account and they will encrypt and salt the database of logins they must store. Unfortunately, not all of them run ethical systems and emails, passwords, birthdays, credit card numbers and much more has been leaked in major incidents over the last few years by some of the biggest names on the internet. The idiots.