The IT Nerd

In the last ten minutes, I received a phishing e-mail. Now I get these sort of e-mails all the time. But this one that I have screen captured below is the worst one ever.

The picture in this alleged INTERPOL identity card is of former Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper. This may not be obvious to those outside of Canada, but this fraudster is unlikely to get a single Canadian to fall for his scheme. And seeing as this blog has readers around the globe, a lot of other people won’t fall for this scheme either.

If anything deserves a #fail, it’s this.

Today is 420 day. For those of you who don’t smoke cannabis, it celebrates the consumption of the drug and the culture related to it. To celebrate this, Snapchat has a Bob Marley filter. The filter gives you both dreadlocks and digital blackface.

Wow. That is so culturally and racially insensitive. What genius at Snapchat came up with this idea? Did they not think this through seeing as this could go horribly sideways in so many ways? Did they not consider that they’ve taken one of the most influential musicians and reduce his legacy to a pot smoking joke? What in the world could ever convince Snapchat that this was a great idea?

If something deserves a #fail, this does.

Millennials are supposed to be the tech savy generation as they spend their lives Tweeting, updating their Facebook status and Instagramming. But clearly common sense does not seem to enter their thought process as more than one in five 18-24 year olds (21 per cent) store PINs for credit or debit cards on their smartphones, tablets or laptops, according to research conducted by Equifax in conjunction with Gorkana. That leaves them wide open to fraud. That’s clearly not the best move from a security standpoint and if you read through the article, you’ll see other bad practices as well.

So, let’s say you want to store sensitive info on your phone. What do you do to keep it secure? My suggestion is to use an app like eWallet which encrypts that data. I should also note that iOS 9.3 has encrypted notes as well. Either option is better than having them as notes in your notepad or something similar on your phone.

When you pay someone to host your website, you never think about what could happen to your site if the provider had some sort of issue. Here’s an example of why you should think long and hard about that. UK hosting and domains provider 123-Reg has been struck by a weekend issue that knocked an unspecified number of VPS customers offline. The company posted a status message saying that the unspecified issues arose on April 16. The alleged cause is one that will get your attention:

123-reg customer, software company INNmaster, contacted The Register directing our attention to its post on the topic, claiming a rogue script had deleted customer sites.

“At 7am on Saturday morning someone at our hosting provider ran a script that had a catastrophic error in it. The result was that the script deleted the servers and websites of all their customers!”

INNmaster’s post says that company has implemented a disaster recovery plan, running up a backup server in a different location, but expresses sympathy for anybody without a proper backup.

This company had a disaster recovery plan. But it sucks to be those who don’t. The bottom line is that you can’t trust a third party to protect your data, thus you have to do it yourself. In the meantime, one has to wonder what sort of “rogue script” could do this level of damage. This is something that 123-reg will have to speak to sooner rather than later.