security Archives - Splintt online training services Thu, 19 Dec 2024 13:23:43 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.7.5 https://www.splintt.nl/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/cropped-Splint-favicon-roze-32x32.png security Archives - Splintt 32 32 I wouldn’t want to lose it https://www.splintt.nl/en/i-wouldnt-want-to-lose-it/ https://www.splintt.nl/en/i-wouldnt-want-to-lose-it/#respond Fri, 04 Sep 2020 07:29:54 +0000 https://www.splintt.nl/i-wouldnt-want-to-lose-it/ The post I wouldn’t want to lose it appeared first on Splintt.

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I wouldn’t want to lose it

Would you also find it terrible if your laptop got stolen? Or if it suddenly stopped working? I would. Not so much because I would have to buy a new one (I already had my eye on the latest MacBook Pro), but because of all the history I would lose. The photos and videos that can’t be replaced. I’m just afraid that along the way, I’ve already lost some things, despite all the cybersecurity and information security protocols I follow.

At least you don’t lose photo albums. I know exactly which cabinet at my parents’ house holds all the photo books. They are brought out every now and then, and then they go back to the same place. I can specifically look for that one photo where I’m 5 years old and so angry that my cheeks are the color of an eggplant, or where I’m with my best friends from elementary school, that photo just after my mother removed the flowerpot from my head to show my new haircut (after she had put a band-aid on my ear).

I know the photos, I know exactly what they look like, and if I start talking to my mother or brother about the eggplant photo, they know what I’m talking about, what the photo looks like, which book it’s in, and roughly on which page. It’s funny, we laugh about it, and sometimes it’s nice to actually look at the photo again.

On my laptop, it’s the opposite world. There are folders with names like “photos” and “New folder” and “IMG_0909.” Because that seemed logical at the time. I think. And these are then hidden in overarching folders named “backup” followed by a date. Backups of laptops that had backups of earlier laptops. All very organized.

I have no idea what beautiful pictures you might find if you open the folders. They contain thousands of photos, transferred from cameras and phones and other laptops of mine or others. If I randomly click on some, I find pictures where I don’t recognize anything, where I’m in the photo but have no idea what’s going on, or where I vaguely remember what I wanted to photograph but can’t tell you who the people are.

There are also all sorts of variations of those photos, because why be frugal with those MBs you can reuse, right? Variations with a slightly different smile, blurry and shaky variations, variations where I can’t really tell the difference. The collection has never been cleaned up, and no selection has ever been made, as you would do for a physical photo album.

So, I almost never look at them. I can’t say with a straight face that I’ve never lost photos. Maybe I accidentally deleted a backup once, or never made a backup. I do know that I can never find what I’m looking for. That’s also a form of losing.

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]]> https://www.splintt.nl/en/i-wouldnt-want-to-lose-it/feed/ 0 Phishing through the years https://www.splintt.nl/en/phishing-through-the-years/ https://www.splintt.nl/en/phishing-through-the-years/#respond Thu, 28 May 2020 07:34:20 +0000 https://www.splintt.nl/phishing-through-the-years/ The post Phishing through the years appeared first on Splintt.

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Phishing through the years

Lately, I’ve noticed that phishing emails are hardly distinguishable from real ones. Where are the days when you could just laugh heartily at the desperate attempts of these cybercriminals? The question used to be, “Who falls for this?” when you showed a funny example to your colleague. Now the question is more, “How can I tell this is phishing?”

Filled with nostalgic feelings and longing for the good old days, I googled the evolution of phishing, a phenomenon that appeared on the digital scene as early as 1996. And that wasn’t the only interesting fact I came across. Phishing scams use fake emails and websites as bait to trick unsuspecting victims into voluntarily exposing their sensitive information. Just like you use bait to catch fish. And that’s where the name comes from. “But why is it spelled with a ‘ph’?” I hear you ask. Well, that was also traceable. Hackers were then also called “phreaks,” and “phreaking” referred to experimenting with and studying telecommunication systems by these underground groups.

In the beginning, phishers created credit card numbers using an algorithm. It sounds complicated and not really foolproof, but it turned out that they hit the proverbial jackpot often enough through the sheer volume of attempts to make it profitable. With the created fake credit cards, they opened accounts with the American internet provider AOL, and they used these to send out more phishing attempts. Until AOL put a stop to it.

The next step was what we still encounter in phishing emails today: they posed as employees of a company and sent emails with urgent requests and threatening consequences. And yes, phishers wouldn’t be phishers if they didn’t pose as employees of the very company that thwarted their previous plans: AOL. Over the years, phishers expanded their repertoire to emails from banks, online stores, postal services, customs, tax authorities, and so on. They also got better at it, realized they needed to make fewer spelling mistakes, and started getting more creative in their attempts.

I really long for the time when I could still chuckle at the repeated message that I was the millionth visitor, no matter which site I visited, or the chance to win a €100 voucher for the local McDonald’s. Click now! Those were the days.

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