Our existence has become a daily onslaught of efforts by thieves and scoundrels to lie to us, cheat us, and steal everything we have and everything anyone we have ever known has. Emails, phone calls, web sites, apps, postal mail... nearly all of it is nothing more than an attempt to steal from us. Treat it as such.
One tip. Treat anything that isn’t actually a technology that truly identifies the sender, as a (almost always worthless) message from a stranger.
That anybody treats texts or emails as valid to begin with, is relatively stupid. Always has been.
Bad habit. Break it. Most email outside of a controlled network and system can be thrown right in the trash folder without much difference in life.
Was laughing out loud at the FBI thing claiming bad people are spoofing elections related emails. Gee, you think?
Morons receiving emails don’t question them and definitely don’t read email headers — and never have. Most people don’t.
Couldn’t have predicted THAT. LOL. Easily.
Like the number one way to attack any company for years and years now?
People need a reset on which tech they think is authenticated and identified properly.
It’s happening the hard way because they don’t pay even the slightest attention to the flat fact that email and SMS and Caller ID on phone calls are ALL 100% compromised — and none were designed or intended for authenticated communications.
If people want secure communications systems they have to actually choose one that was designed to do that.
My favorite this week is Yelp adding a “racist business” tracking tag. Ooh that’ll be fun for the fake review accounts to use as a weapon. LOL. Can’t possibly see that problem coming considering most accounts doing online reviews are fake accounts now. Haha.
Thieves and scoundrels will take advantage of the general stupidity surrounding the ubiquitous pocket computers running completely insecure protocols, and that is zero surprise here. Number one way to reach people who think their Comm systems are legitimate and secure and trustworthy.
Expecting better of any of those technologies without adding end to end encryption as an identifier, is completely and utterly silly. And futile.
I figured out how to spoof caller ID names (not numbers - already had that) from our phone system to Verizon’s network yesterday. Stumbled on it attempting to tag some calls with their target number internally. Found an undocumented feature where the system will happily send the alpha out to another major carrier and Verizon will happily accept it.
Want a call from “Elvis”? LOL. How about “IRS”? So far all I sent was “NateTagTest”. My iOS device says I have a missed call or ten from whoever that is.
It ain’t the bad guys so much as the unreasonable and unearned trust people have when looking at anything on a computer or pocket computer (smartphone). Gave the bad guys an easy way into people’s lives and brains.
Within ten years the deep fake tech for audio and video will make all audio and video not sourced via end to end encryption as likely to be completely fake as real too.
How often has that stupid aerobatics video losing a wing in flight and landing it gone around? And it’s a horrible fake. Easily spotted. Still forwarded regularly to people years after it was released.
