We need Cyber Army instead of Space force. Trillions spent on TOYS - Bombers, etc. - didn't defend us from hacking by a foreign country. Russia is being blamed but no one knows. Silence by Trump and Putin makes it suspects on whether it is TRUE or FALSE. It may be friendly country/our allies, who knows?
Sorry hackers got hacked, timing is absolutely brilliant - we are in forced transition(??) or it may be warning to the in-coming administration.
I don't know what is safe anymore.
Activating VPN on my home laptop and changing all user names and passwords and 2-factor authentication on all accounts.
What are you doing without going into political debate?
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Russia's foreign intelligence service, the SVR, is believed to have carried out the hack.
Malware was inserted into a service which provides updates to the Orion software platform used to monitor the health of IT networks. It is estimated that a total of 18,000 customers (Fortune 500 companies, federal government agencies, etc.) are impacted. This is an extremely serious threat which will take considerable time to eradicate. However, the perpetrators are only interested in high-value targets. They are not pursuing the "average Joe".
When we were kids, the households of those us of a certain age had telephone numbers that began with a "word" prefix which always had the first two letters capitalized- ie CEntral, or MOntgomery and so forth, followed by five numbers, as in CEntral 7 5678. When dialing, we dialed the first two letters of the prefix, as in CE75678.
I'm pretty sure that most of us old timers easily remember some such phone number from when they were kids, and the beauty of it is that younger hackers would have no idea of any of this.
Spell out the entire prefix and add a dash, as in CEntral7-5678 and you have a pretty damned good password which you're not likely to forget.
Stay "SAFE" , Derf
I have an easy password to remember. It's obscene, with double-zero added, because all websites now demand a combo of letters AND numbers. ....But then there are those who demand that the password be made even more secure. But they don't bother to TELL you that, when you go to create your damn password. So, you find out about the Rules of the Game only AFTER you've wasted your time, playing the game, once already.
...And that drives me insane. So, the longer, extra-special password I create in that case is even more filthy and obscene----- including the same two numbers I wanted in there, too.
S.S. has made logging-in so difficult, I just don't do it anymore. And the credit union I mostly do business with will allow me to "authenticate" my "device," so I don't have to use double-authentication every time I log-in. (They will text or email me a numeric passcode.) Except that, so far, the ad-blocker and privacy add-ons I've put on this new laptop seems to be an effective combination. And so, the lovely credit union's website never recognizes that I have authorized it to "recognize" my %%$#@***!!! "device." ... And Firefox has some sort of flavor of "security" stuff running, while I use it. Don't ask me to describe it...