Reasonably Random Rants and Raves

A friend of mine just had someone break into his Facebook account. Means that it’s a good time to point out some of the tips that I pass along to people at school about making your computing experience more secure:

• Pick better passwords. Avoid the use of words from the dictionary. Use punctuation characters and capital letters in your passwords. Makes it harder for people to use brute-force dictionary scanners on your account.
• Don’t use the same password for every account! That limits the damage if someone does guess your password on one account.
• Don’t assume that you’re safe just because you’re using an Apple computer or running Linux. Most successful hacking is social engineering based; remember that PEBKAC (Problem Exists Between Keyboard and Chair) is quite accurate.
• Use a firewall. Almost all of the home routers sold today include a built-in NAT firewall. Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux all include firewall software. Turn them on if your router doesn’t include a firewall.
• Make certain to turn on automatic updates for your operating system. This is EXTREMELY important for Windows users.
• Use anti-virus software on Windows. There are very good free products that you can download. Make certain that you keep the software and virus signature data up-to-date. This is less of a concern for Linux and Mac OS X but the truly paranoid run anti-virus software on those operating systems as well.
• Don’t open e-mail attachments and don’t click on web pages embedded in e-mails unless you’re 120% certain you know who sent you the message. And be worried even in that case.
• Avoid Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. Even the most recent version has its problems. Use Firefox, Safari, or Opera instead. If you do use IE, make certain to upgrade to most recent version.
• Turn off HTML mail if you use a dedicated e-mail client. Outlook and Outlook Express have gotten better recently at not letting malicious HTML code cause problems but the risk is still high enough where you’re better off turning off this feature.

Will this prevent you getting hacked, infected, or otherwise pwned? Not completely but practicing this sort of good hygiene will significantly reduce your exposure to this type of maleficence in the future.

Selah.

how?