Cautionary Tales of Technological Slip-ups - Part One

Cautionary Tales of Technological Slip-ups, Part One

A warning against weak passwords

One of the worst things you might do is ignore the huge number of demands to tighten, even slightly, the passwords you have, regardless of your ability to memorize them or not, for you can write them in more than one safe place you have, instead of having them be like the widespread words 123456 or 111111, or even the word Password or @d1mn and other weak words that are cracked in minutes. A password should be no less than 8 characters and contain symbols, numbers, or letters, or use password creation and storage systems such as LastPass and Google Password.

A warning against scam calls and emails

Most certainly you have received a group of emails concerned with 'Congratulations, you have won such and such,' and then you are asked to send your data or even pay a shipping amount and so on, and the same is the case with short phone SMS messages. These are most certainly fraud and scam messages, and thousands fall for them monthly around the world, so beware of them and delete them immediately, and do not live in a Cinderella world thinking that luck has smiled upon you.

A warning against some home camera technicians

Never trust anyone who installs home camera devices, and immediately request a mechanism to change the password for accessing the cameras, for sometimes the weak-souled exploit access to your home cameras from the internet without your knowledge. And do not skimp by buying unknown surveillance devices, lest they become, God forbid, a scandal instead of protection.

A warning against not installing an antivirus

Some may take the matter of installing an antivirus for their device lightly, and we are talking here about Windows and Mac devices, for these devices need an antivirus to protect them. In this way you too participate in protecting other computers, for the staggering number of viruses born every day only increases the security risk to your devices. The nice thing is that there are free programs that give you free protection such as Kaspersky, AVG, and Avast, but the first is by far the strongest, and it is preferable to buy the full version, which will cost you less than 10 dirhams a month only to protect your data and your time from being wasted on repairing the device, and it may reach the point where your device is infected with ransomware, and then regret is of no use at all.

A warning against agreeing to browser notifications

Many people are annoyed by the abundance of notifications they receive from various sites, especially news and advertising ones, and the user is often the cause of this. When entering most of these sites now, you find the browser asking you that this site wishes to send notification messages to your device, and most people fall into the mistake of agreeing to that, so intrusive waves of messages reach them, some of which may be useful, but due to their abundance they have become very annoying. So you must pay close attention to prevent that, and to cancel this flood you must go to the browser settings, then notifications, and cancel the sites that are bothering you.

A warning against taking compromising photos

Many like to photograph themselves using the phone's cameras, regardless of the reasons, but there is a very dangerous point, namely photographing yourself in compromising and indecent poses and images, for keeping such images from being seen by anyone is considered among the nearly impossible tasks. As we know, there is no secure system and there never will be, and some devices are capable of recovering deleted images. It is true that there are ways to reduce the chance of recovering them, such as resetting the phone, then running the camera to record video at the highest quality and letting the phone fill up, then deleting the video and repeating the process 4 to 8 times to ensure the difficulty of recovering the data, and this process may be useful in case of wishing to sell the phone, but it may never be of use to you.

Engineer Ahmed Al Zarooni, my article in Al Roeya UAE newspaper