Internet Security

[Henri Dufresne]

I offered a onlyfans model money for a video and I received this message:

OnlyFans.

At onlyfans.

Your message has been removed because it has violated our Acceptable Use Policy or Community Guidelines. These measures are in place to support and protect our community on Onlyfans.

Message = I can pay you via bitcoin, it is really easy.

Gents, Onlyfans messages are monitored.

[SamanFan]

My background: I am a security information analist.

I don't think the escort got your GPS info of your phone. Something was lost in translation. I am sure she asked for an actual photo of the hotel. (A pic of the room or the lobby could worked) It's a well known procedure from some working girls because there are a lot of fake key room pics.

The girl can not get your GPS info unless you download something in your phone. A funky link could do that. I don't think it's the case but it's a great idea buying a burner cheap phone. If you think the phone is compromised you can turn off and dump it.

Many girls will request share your ubication via Whatsapp. I just don't recommend this for newbies or getting new escorts unless you are in a hotel with some security.

It was a beautiful morning in Mexico City also called CDMX now a days. I had a first time date setup with an escort who comes recommended on the blogdebusti.com page and advertises on Twitter. The standard procedure with Mexican escorts is they communicate on Whatsapp after making contact and when you have a meeting date planed they want you to confirm by snapping a picture of your hotel room key to prove you're legit. Obviously it saves them time to weed out the wiesels who would waste their time.

So our date is not until later in the morning and I had time to leave my hotel to go to a restaurant with a decent ham and eggs breakfast. That's where I was when my phone got a Whatsapp message from my date asking me to send the picture..

[AquaWatt]

It was a beautiful morning in Mexico City also called CDMX now a days. I had a first time date setup with an escort who comes recommended on the blogdebusti.com page and advertises on Twitter. The standard procedure with Mexican escorts is they communicate on Whatsapp after making contact and when you have a meeting date planed they want you to confirm by snapping a picture of your hotel room key to prove you're legit. Obviously it saves them time to weed out the wiesels who would waste their time.

So our date is not until later in the morning and I had time to leave my hotel to go to a restaurant with a decent ham and eggs breakfast. That's where I was when my phone got a Whatsapp message from my date asking me to send the picture. I snapped a picture of the key showing the name / address of the hotel and sent it off. The girl responded she needed a real-time picture taken at the hotel, I'm translating from Spanish here. So she's tracking my phone with GPS and she knows where I am now. What the fuck! She says she has to have a picture taken at the hotel or she's not going to show. I explained I was at the restaurant but I'm not sure she got the Whatsapp because she said she didn't trust me any more and I think she might have blocked me.

If this girl has found a way to track the location of my phone using GPS then that's some serious shit! I was using a burner phone and I've already taken the battery out of it and also the GSM chip so the girl couldn't track me all the way home. I'm ready to take a ball peen hammer to it if I have to.

I don't want to be the target of blackmail because that would ruin the whole mongering experience for me. If any of you techies on the board can shed any light on this please do.

[XXL]

Victims are Amy and Jessica. They never existed of course. Not that it matters, but typical of the BBC to be unable to report on ANYTHING without reinforcing the female victim vs male abuser paradigm. Maybe wives don't need an app because they have nothing to do all day except scheming against their unsuspecting fool of a drudging husband.

Note that the recommendation "if you aren't using an app, delete it" is not very useful. Many apps are used by Android, they're not apps "you use". Even after an internet search it is often not clear if it is wise to get rid of them. Some apps are not deletable. Others will delete then your smartphone will malfunction. Not simple. Operating systems should have a labelling showing you can get rid of an app without running into smartphone trouble.

A good idea is to set seldom used apps in "no background activity allowed" mode. It saves power and data. Exceptions are banking apps and apps like Ueber and Google Maps for navigation.

Regarding cloud, I have been using Google Drive for 3 years now. Seems OK. You can have one benign google account that always stays visible, plus one google account with sensitive cloud drive data which you disconnect from ("remove") when not in use.

[Intransit]

Protect yourself: never lose control of your devices, neither physically nor securely.

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-50166147

Stalkerware: The software that spies on your partner.

By Joe Tidy.

Cyber-security reporter.

Amy says it all started when her husband seemed to know intimate details about her friends.

"he would drop snippets into conversations, such as knowing about Sarah's baby. Really private things that he shouldn't have known about. If I asked how he knew these things, he'd say I'd told him and accuse me of losing it," she says.

Amy. Not her real name. Also began to wonder how he seemed to know where she was all the time.

"Sometimes he would say he saw me at a cafe where I was meeting my friends and say he was just passing by chance. I started to question everything and trust no-one, even my friends," she says.

For months, these incidents built up, turning an abusive marriage into a nightmare that came to a chilling conclusion after a Halloween family trip.

"We'd been to visit a pumpkin patch and were having a rare good weekend, which basically means my husband hadn't taken anything out on me. Our six-year-old son was playing on the floor and was so happy," Amy says.

"My husband passed me his phone to show me a picture he'd taken at the farm and in that split-second I saw an alert pop up on his screen. It read, 'Daily report on Amy's Mac is ready to view. '.

"I felt this chill go through me and I stopped breathing for a minute. I had to excuse myself and pretended I needed the bathroom. I had to be there for my son and pretend that I hadn't seen anything.

"The first moment I could, I went to the library to use the computer and look up the spyware he'd used. That's when everything made sense after months of thinking I was going crazy. ".

Stalkerware. Also known as spouseware. Are powerful surveillance software programs typically sold openly online.

On a device, all messages can be read, screen activity recorded, GPS locations tracked and cameras used to spy on what an individual is doing.

According to cyber-security company Kaspersky, the number of people who have discovered such software on their devices has risen by at least 35% in the past year.

Kaspersky researchers say their protection technologies have detected stalkerware on 37,532 devices so far this year.

And principal security researcher David Emm says this is the "tip of a very large iceberg".

"Most people will routinely protect a laptop or desktop, not that many people actually protect a mobile device," he says.

"This information is coming back from installations of our product on (smartphones). So this figure doesn't even go close to what the total would be. ".

Kaspersky's findings indicate Russia is the country with the highest levels of stalkerware activity. India, Brazil, the United States and Germany complete the top five, with the UK in eighth place with 730 detections.

Another security company says there are practical steps people can take if they suspect they are already being spied on.

"It's always advisable to check which apps are on your phone and conduct a virus scan where necessary and if there are any apps on your device that you do not recognise it is worth searching online for reviews and deleting them," says Jake Moore, from Eset.

"As a general rule, if you aren't using an app, delete it. ".

Once Amy realised her computer had been compromised, she developed a severe mistrust of technology, which she is only just overcoming.

Charities say this is a common psychological response to such a trauma.

Jessica was another victim of stalkerware. Her ex-husband routinely spied on her through her phone's microphone and would play mind games by repeating specific phrases she and her friends had used in private conversations.

It's been years since she escaped the relationship but she still leaves her phone locked in the car when seeing friends.

Gemma Toynton, from domestic abuse charity Safer Places, says she see this long-term effect a lot in her cases.

"It reduces someone's trust," she says. "It makes them see a phone or laptop as a weapon, because that's what it's been used for.

"Technology has become, in their minds like a net around them and a lot of people do withdraw from using the internet.

"It really does impact your whole life. The fact that this stalkerware is on the rise is a real concern. ".

Amy, who is from the US, is now divorced and lives many miles away from her ex-husband.

She has a restraining order preventing him from direct contact with her and he is legally allowed to communicate logistics about their son's care via written letter only.

I tested out one of the most popular consumer products, which costs £140 for three months of surveillance.

I bought it online and installed it on to my work phone. It took me about an hour and I used the 24-hour live support offered by the company when I encountered any problems.

Spyware companies advertise their services as "employee monitoring" or "parental control" products.

In many countries, including the UK, using the spyware on a spouse without their permission is illegal, so many of the companies' websites are littered with disclaimers advising against this.

However, some of the same websites link to articles, seemingly written by associates, recommending the software as a spy tool for "cheatings wives and husbands".

In a live chat with the company whose product I was testing, I directly told them: "I want to install this on my wife's phone, will it be secret?

The customer service-representative responded: "The application will start to work in stealth mode right after installation. I'll be happy to help. ".

I also downloaded five of the top cyber-security products on to the infected mobile and carried out a free scan.

All of them gave alerts for "potentially harmful software".

The Crown Prosecution Service says there aren't specific laws related to the use of stalkerware but any criminal activity like this can be prosecuted by a number of means including the Protection from Harassment Act 1997.

Amy says more should be done to legislate against the use of these technologies.

"They need to stop hiding behind plausible deniability," she says.

"There is a wink that's given when they send this little disclaimer that says, 'We don't approve of you spying on wives. ' They know what their customers are doing though. This software causes real harm. ".

[AfAsia]

Installed this add-on several days back, lets you know who is tracking your online activity. Ghostery not only names your 'trackers' but offers you the option of blocking them. Of interest to the paranoid, ISG has only one tracker, that being Statcounter, if Ghostery are to be believed. If you are a Firefox user simply go to add-ONS and search for Ghostery, Firefox then installs this to your browser bar.

[FellaFromNorth]

Dunno if these two applications have been mentioned before, but I strongly recommend TrueCrypt for quickly and securely encrypting your files. With a sufficiently strong password, it's practically impossible (or, at least, it'll take a LONG time to crack, possibly many years depending on the passwrod) to bruteforce. You can encrypt files, folders, the entire OS or even creating hidden encryptions.

www.truecrypt.org

And then the Tor Browser for anonymous online browsing.

www.torproject.org

Guides exist online for how to use these, so google for them.

[Legal Tender]

the usa department of homeland security has concocted a remarkable new policy:

it reserves the right to seize for an indefinite period of time laptops taken across the border.

a pair of dhs policies from last month say that customs agents can routinely.

-as a matter of course-seize, make copies of, and

"analyze the information transported by any individual attempting to

enter, re-enter, depart, pass through, or reside in the united states."

the entire article is at this address:

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-10004646-38.html

the issue is whether these searches violate the 4th amendment to the constitution: protection against unreasonable search and seizures. there is no easy answer. the aclu has recently sued to adjudicate this issue: "abidor v. napolitano: aclu challenges suspicionless laptop border search policy"

http://www.aclu.org/free-speech-tech...-v-napolitano.

[Bimbo Boy]

I have tried Dropbox www.dropbox.com and I am very impressed. It is a service that allows you to keep your confidential files "in the cloud" away from your computer. You can have 2 gigabytes for free. Just be sure to delete your browser's history before crossing borders!

[Piper1]

Someone tried to log in to my account many times earlier today, but my account was automatically locked by ISG twice, after the failed hacker tried to work out my password many times over a few hours (thanks for that security feature Jackson). The hack attempt IP addresses were in Spain and Germany (but that doesn't mean much, as they were probably using a proxy server from elsewhere).

Dear Failed Hacker - don't waste your time - there's nothing interesting in my account. I don't keep any confidential info in my account or my PMs, I have emptied my PM box and will change my password a little more often. Guys, probably a good idea to do the same.

[Black Spidey]

I watch too much of porn online.

Does the ISP know what site I visited? Are they monitored or recorded some where?

Should I be worried?

Spidey

[Freeler]

Many travelers threw out their large notebooks and turned to much smaller netbooks instead - me included.
But one of these netbook, the Acer Aspire One (AA1), has a flaw that is irritating at best.
If you don't know what to do or what happened in the first place, you might even send your netbook to the bin...
It happened to me and, judging from the large number of Q&A's on the web, it might happen to you if you own or use an Acer Aspire One (AA1) netbook.
One day you turn it on and nothing happens.
The screen stays black... Forever.

That's when you're glad you made an AA1 bootable usb rescue drive.
I compiled it from several solutions I found on the web and it works 100% - that's garanteed or have me banned!

You can download the files you need, including a 'follow to the letter' manual, at this address:
http://rapidshare.com/files/18692481...ue_package.zip

[Black Eyes]

Has any one used the proxy in the 3.5G broadbond internet.

May I have some comments on this topic.

[Liathain]

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has concocted a remarkable new policy:
It reserves the right to seize for an indefinite period of time laptops taken across the border.

A pair of DHS policies from last month say that customs agents can routinely
--as a matter of course--seize, make copies of, and
"analyze the information transported by any individual attempting to
enter, re-enter, depart, pass through, or reside in the United States."

The entire article is at this address:

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-10004646-38.html

[AfAsia]

CCleaner - www.ccleaner.com - excellent free utility for removing temp files and browser traces

Take care! before downloading CCleaner...ensure you are able to uninstal, should you so wish...any help on this?