Black Friday On My Mind

Ah – tomorrow – the dreaded Black Friday, yet another unwanted import from Trumpland.

But, JASK – already previously subjected here to the blogging treatment – has some security advice to offer as they, rightly, note that the criminal fraternity have a great window of opportunity to take advantage of the online buying frenzy.

The company advises that stealing from and defrauding shoppers too excited by the lure of a huge discount to be aware they are being scammed, is accompanied by very focused campaigns, planned well in advance and that follow to the date and specific product detail offers that shoppers may publish in order to orchestrate and disguise their attack campaigns. JASK also notes that said malicious actors have the capability of affecting or even preventing stores operating online, but then a badly designed website/capacity/redundancy is equally capable of achieving the same result -)

Rod Soto, Director of Security at JASK, suggests a few damage limitation methods, such as using a credit card, rather than a debit card, so there are at least some safeguards, shop at familiar (to you) sites and use common sense where an offer appears too good to be true and don’t click on that link!

Two more pieces of advice are equally applicable to general online activity – one, never repeat your passwords in other online shops and use password vaults to generate strong and random passwords (and don’t use your phone browser) and two, make sure your computer is up to date with patches and security fixes.

I have one further piece of advice to proffer: forget stupid Black Friday shopping and just go down the pub instead…