Up Times • Sept. 2024

Bryley-curated stories from around the internet:

What can you do? – The recent so-called MOAB (mother of all breaches), reported in July’s Up Times, means this is a good time to increase your security measures.

Check if your email address or addresses have shown up in breaches at haveibeenpwned.com. This particular breach is displayed on the haveibeenpwned.com site as National Public Data, the data broker that seems to have been the source of the leaked data. The site also shows that social security numbers are among this leaked data.

So get a credit freeze or lock. And take steps to guard your social security number, as explained in this investopedia piece … [7 min. read] investopedia.com

Can’t go wrong here – The New York Times compiled this hierarchy of personal security practices and their associated time and money investment. Many of the practices they advocate are quick and free.

Top among the security practices is having strong passwords and not reusing them from site to site (and reuse includes barely changing them). Bryley’s recommendations about what makes for a strong password is here (the principles are the same as in the Times).

Also consider the advice about using alternate email addresses and phone numbers on websites when possible – like the anonymizers via Apple’s iCloud or simplelogin.io. Though less conventional, it’s a similar tactic to having a different password at each website … [the overview can be read in about 15 min.] nytimes.com

… it was abstract, part of a murky continuum of financial crimes aided by technology – At the time of her daughter’s wedding Globe Magazine reporter Linda Matchan was defrauded of $5000. Matchan spent two years to try and uncover what went amiss and try to find some kind of justice.

She writes that after futilely trying to get resolution with the bank on the phone over the course of days, she drove the three-and-a-half hours from Boston to learn for herself from a Saratoga Springs bank employee that, someone had actually come into the bank and spoken to a teller, presented a driver’s license, and then correctly answered some authentication questions ...

Was this bank perpetrator just a front for a well-funded mob? Who are the federal and state laws set up to protect? Along the way she discovered other countries’ much better governmental safeguards.

For Matchan the stress of getting her bank statement each month and the actual nightmares persist … [25 min. read] bostonglobe.com (paywall)

Nothing is real maybe – This image turns out to be AI-generated. It’s among those I got wrong on the Northwestern test linked in this article from the MIT Media Lab. The MIT researchers tell you the signs to look out for. But some of the generated images are awfully good. Looking again – those jeans are a bit wrinkled weird, the knuckles are off on the bow hand and the fingers on the neck are kind of missing the neck. Do we need to become experts at this? Maybe you heard about the fake Kamala Harris video. (oh, and the Northwestern test is lacking some images, but it’s still worthwhile and unsettling) … [4 min. read] media.mit.edu

Anatomy of a Business Email Compromise scam – Gallery owner Jason Horjes played along with criminals to see what their game was. And they tried to manipulate him with flattery, urgency, anger and a big, fat, good-looking, worthless check (or two) … [10 min. read] reddotblog.com

^{Note: The section directly above is Bryley’s curated list of external stories. Bryley does not take credit for the content of these stories, nor does it endorse or imply an affiliation with the authors or publications in which they appear.}