Having found myself roped into assisting as co-administrator a couple of Facebook groups with security/privacy issues, I thought I should, perhaps, share what little I know about defending your group against scam and spam posts and comments by tightening up group settings. Caveat: I’ve never really wanted to spend a ... Read More

I’ve been seeing an unpleasant scam attack being spread via a friend’s account today: I think from a cloned rather than hacked account, but I can’t be sure. 1. If you see a link to an article that apparently describes how Elon Musk is going to make UK residents rich… ... Read More

Facecrooks nails Facebook/Meta on (at least) two of its less attractive attributes. Firstly, its reliance on artificial intelligence, in this case using a faulty algorithm to correct a faulty algorithm. Presumably because AI works out cheaper than human eyes for fact-checking. Secondly, its lack of commitment to customer service. Its ... Read More

I’ve spent a lot of time recently writing about FB account cloning, simply because I come across it so often. I haven’t paid nearly so much attention to real account hacking because I don’t come across it nearly so often, However, having had occasion to look at it recently, it’s ... Read More

[For some reason I posted this several months ago on my Dataholics blog, when this one might have been at least as obvious a place to put it. I haven’t anything new to say on the topic: I’m just putting it here for completeness.] There was never much chance of ... Read More

Checking in on Facebook much too late last night, I noticed an invitation to connect from someone who is already a Facebook friend, so, as I always do, I sent them a message telling them that it looked as if their account had been cloned, and that several friends had ... Read More

One of the consequences of the ease with which a phone number can be spoofed, combined with the fact that scammers tend to know more about you than the tech support scammers of old, is that they can often spoof the customer services phone number that your bank or credit ... Read More

I’ve been seeing a certain amount of panic about Google’s inclusion of .zip and .mov in its recent launch of eight new Top Level domains (TLDs). While I don’t think adding to the list of TLDs that can be confused with filename extensions, I think the risks may have been ... Read More

Despite no longer being paid to provide consultancy to the IT security industry, I couldn’t resist catching up with an interesting BBC initiative called Scam Interceptors. Having been appalled in the past when Click actually bought a botnet*, thus feeding scammers in the name of investigative journalism and self-congratulation, I ... Read More

I may need to give up social media altogether. I can’t seem to avoid seeing scams in all directions, and I can’t seem to ignore them, even though writing about this stuff is no longer my living. Perhaps it’s a curse, or the result of a misspent life: I remind ... Read More