For Boomer

If you look at this and believe it, this post is for you…

Hacking is becoming more prevalent in the army community and so is doxing. Many of the newer/younger soldiers, in both experience and age, are easily susceptible to these attacks and there really is no army that has made a big deal about teaching their soldiers some safety tips or educated their soldiers about what to do.

First on my list is hacking threats. There are hacking threats on armies or chats or people all the time. Each one should be taken seriously but don’t freak out.

Freaking out won’t do anything for you but panic other people and cause general chaos. Instead, tell a leader, find out if the hacker is from an army, and try to figure out if the hacking threat is real or not. Try to follow the safety tips I’ll outline later on in this post. In general, acting instead of freaking out will give you a chance to avoid being hacked, if the hacking threat is real.

If a site is hacked, well, theres nothing you can do about it unless you are the owner of the site. Try to email wordpress and explain the situation. They may be able to get your site back. Plus the site creator can always regain control of the site by contacting wordpress if they are removed or unadmined.

If your chat is hacked, don’t go running to another chat, especially if that other chat’s link is given on main chat. Its counter-productive and makes no sense at all. If a hacker is already on the chat, they they’ll just see the link and follow if they want to. Instead, just go offline for an hour or so. You won’t be tempted to challenge the hacker or get them irritated. I know, running away seems like a stupid idea but what else can you do?

Try to at least get the person’s registered name [if they're logged in] and their xat id number. You get these by clicking on their name and they are located:

You can then report that person to xat. It probably won’t do anything, but its something. It sometimes can help the owners identify the person to see if they can negotiate with them.

For scamming, do the same thing. Get the person’s xat ID number if not also their registered name. Then report that to xat along with reporting it to your leader. If they are doing their job right, they will ban that person forever on their chat and try to search for them to see if they can get your powers back [not likely, but people sometimes get lucky].

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Doxing

Doxing: When a person’s personal information is made available for all users to see or just found out and used for blackmail

Doxing is increasing mainly due to the fact that personal info is more easily found on the internet. For example Facebook is one of the main privacy leaks and the easiest way to figure out a person’s real name or even where they live.

Here are some tips to help keep yourself safe:

Facebook/MySpace [if anyone actually uses that anymore] Tips

• Use a different email for your facebook than you use for your wordpress account or that you normally give out to people
• Make sure you have privacy settings for your facebook. You shouldn’t let people see too much info, or any at all, unless they are at least friends of friends. Even safer is to make everything only viewable to friends.
• You may want to change the search settings so that only people that know your email can find you, or that once again, only friends of friends can find you.

Other Online Tips

• Do not give anyone your real name, facebook email, password, or personal information. You never know who they will tell, especially if they get mad at you
• Unless you are okay with having people know what you look like, or are okay with people being able to use your picture to search for your facebook [there are image searching sites and firefox/chrome applications that allow you to take a picture and search for other copies of it] don’t have any picture of yourself as your xat icon, and don’t give your picture out to anyone
• If you have a photobucket, make sure that it is private if you have pictures you don’t want people to see. If you do care, make the entire album private.

Use your head, don’t accept questionable deals, don’t give out personal info, watch out that you don’t use the same password for multiple things. I know, its hard and annoying, but even adding a different number or two after your usual password helps a lot.

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That brings me to my final topic: Passwords.

I can’t stress it enough, make sure you have a secure password for all of your accounts, especially the important ones.

Password Tips:

• Include post letters and numbers interchanged
• Try not to have “dictionary words.” Basically try to have a random set of letters, like cga57g. If your password is made up of all words you can search for in the dictionary and find, someone can get your password using a dictionary hack.
• Make sure your password is long, about 15 characters in length. Otherwise, a hacker could use a brute force hack to get into your account.
• Spaces help, a lot. Even if your password is “theacp”, making it “the acp”, will increase the strength of it ten-fold.
• Don’t use the same password for multiple accounts. Put a different number or symbol for each account added onto a base password if you can’t remember different passwords. For example, “theacp” could turn into: theacp1,the@acp, the*acp, theacp!, etc…….
• Never enter your password into a page someone links you to, it may be a phishing site. Instead, make sure you go to the correct web page to be certain that your account information is secure.

Be Safe

~Shaboomboom

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