November 2018 - Technology Mini-Bytes

Safety Tip: Use Your Bookmarks Don’t get scammed searching for that perfect pumpkin pie this week. Spoofed internet searches are one of the leading ways that computer users get tricked into downloading malware, and it happens so easily. Say you are searching for your bank. You type in the name of the bank in your internet search engine, click on the first link, and proceed to enter your username and password thinking that it’s, well, your bank. But it’s not! It could be a spoofed site and you just handed the hackers the keys to your kingdom. Can you call them hackers if you give them your password? So what can you do to ensure that you hit your bank’s site and not some fake page? Use Bookmarks. Yes, you know what they are. They have been around forever for a reason. They get you to where you want to go every time. In Safari it’s easy to create and manage your Bookmarks through the Bookmarks Drop-Down Menu.  And remember that when searching for your sites that you intend to Bookmark, the search engine that you use has a lot to do with whether or not you will come across a bogus website. Google does a very good job of cleaning their results. Other services are not nearly as good. Google is not 100% foolproof, but they are far better than the rest. The name of the game is to be very careful on what sites you hit and what information you enter in the pages that you land on. If you are logging into your bank, or credit union, or broker’s site, you want to be 100% sure it is them and not some criminal.

Are you making it simple for hackers? If you have been a regular consumer of Mini-Bytes, you have heard me drone on about not using the same password for every single account. What makes it easy for you makes it easy for the bad guys. One password gets them into all of your accounts.  There has been a big round of sextortion emails using old passwords and usernames to scare users into paying thousands in Bitcoin to scammers. Paying these ransoms does nothing, as another email with the same username and password is soon to follow. If you do get one of these emails, make sure that you are no longer using that password for any account. And remember these tips: Use Strong & Varied passwords with at least 8 characters. Mix up numbers, letters and symbols. Don’t use the same password for every account. Enable two-factor authentication when possible. Have a method to securely store and record your passwords, updating the list as things are added or changed. If you save passwords in Safari you can go up to the Safari drop-down menu and choose Preferences. Hit the Passwords tab and authenticate to view the passwords that you have saved. Look for the yellow triangles. They will tell you where you are using this password as a duplicate. It’s a good tool to help you clean up and vary your passwords.

It’s Mojave to High Sierra and That’s It In the past, it was okay to be on an older Mac operating system up to three editions back. Unfortunately, with security in mind, those days are past. We recommend that your Mac be running either the current macOS 10.14 Mojave or the one-year-old macOS 10.13 High Sierra at the very least. It will help make sure that you can run the latest web browsers, and keep up to date with compatibility with your iPhone and iPad. If your Mac will not run either of these systems, then it is definitely time for a new machine. Mojave will run on most Macs 2012 and newer, and High Sierra will go a few years earlier than that. With the industry lifecycle of 3 years, a Mac that is six years or older has definitely performed well.