Security!

Nearly everyone I know who uses Yahoo! for an email provider has had the Yahoo! mail account hacked sometime in the last couple of years, strangers sending out messages over the rightful owner's signature. Russians (okay, Russians and others, let's not be bigots) get hold of the password and use the email account to distribute spam and malware. But you don't have to be on Yahoo!. It can happen to anybody. It happened to me, just last week, on my Host and Store account.

How I knew that this was going on was by the messages that bounced back from the "postmaster" of email, undeliverable, sent from my address. All in Cyrillic. The Russians, those clever devils, are at it again. Actually one of the messages was in Italian, but it was addressed to Yuri somebody-or-other. The message was clearly spam, couched in the form of a job offer: click here to get a good job and turn your life around. Right. I'll be sure to do that, right after I send the Nigerians my bank account number.

Anyway, as a result of having my email account hacked last week I changed my email password. It's a good idea to do that at regular intervals anyway, for all your passwords.

Then the news broke about Heartbleed, which isn't even a hack, or a virus, but a back door that somebody left open when they put the open-source security code together that's supposed to keep the hackers out of many sites. What it does is enable knowledgeable hackers to steal your passwords, maybe your Social Security number, maybe your bank account number, maybe your phone number. Does Host and Store use this open-source code for security? I don't even know. They were too small to be interviewed. I do know that they haven't re-upped the security certificate for my website, not since they've been handling it, so that I get a warning message every time I go to open my mail. But I digress.

Heartbleed. It's everywhere, almost. If you want to know about a particular site, here's a link you can use to inquire: https://lastpass.com/heartbleed/. Although it might not be entirely effective, given that it says that Host and Store's web site doesn't even exist. Bottom line, you might want to stay off the internet for another few days, and then change your passwords. If you change a password before a patch is in place, the hackers can get it right away anyhow, if they want to, or so say the knowing ones.

As for me, I recommend putting nothing out on the internet that you wouldn't want to see on a billboard in Times Square. That includes birthdays. You won't find my birthday on Facebook. I assume you wish me a happy birthday, whenever it is. I wish you one too. It'll be happier if criminals aren't stealing your identity.

Yours in paranoia,

Kate Gallison

Made Ya Look

Phishermen and spambots are getting cleverer and cleverer about getting people to click on their toxic links. For example, someone called Helen Wotzername sent me an email with a convincing Facebook look to it, blue logo, everything, claiming to have posted a comment to my wall: "You're full of $&^%." That, of course, would be perfectly true about a lot of what I post on my wall, but most of my friends are too polite to say so. Furthermore I don't know anybody named Helen Wotzername.

Viewing my mail was the first thing I did this morning. I was not yet wide awake. The email offered me a link to click to view the comment thread, and, Lord help me, I clicked it.

Luckily the site had been somehow dismantled before I clicked the link. In any case I saw at once that it was bogus, and clicked right off again. But it could have been bad. And you could be offered stuff like that. "Look at this picture of you. LOL." That's another good one, tough to resist.

So what if I click on this link, you ask? Well, if it's a Facebook hacker, you could be made to look like a complete horse's patoot in front of all your friends, acquaintances, and Facebook frenemies. Posts signed by you will begin to appear on Facebook: "Ooo! Ooo! I'm having so much fun playing (fill in the game of your choice). Won't you come and play with me?" "I just won a free IPad! Clik here and u can win one 2!" And that's the best that can happen. Worst case, they'll steal your identity and clean out your bank account.

I suppose you're expecting me, as a self-declared left-leaning tax-and-spend Democrat liberal, to demand that the government do something about these sleazy intrusions into our cyberspace. Well, I'm not. The government has no place in our cyberspace or anyone else's. Let the government get its own house in order.

What I am going to say is, watch out. There is no law west of the Pecos, and it's all west of the Pecos out here.

Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.

Kate Gallison