Reply To: Be aware of stalkers/info stealers

What actually happened to me once was that a certain infostealer somehow found out my real name, and made up a facebook name. I confirmed him as a friend but asked him “who are you”? My intention was to remove him in a day. Sure enough, I completely forgot to remove him until he tried connecting to another friend of mine, after which I removed him. So I know something about IT security, and I got nailed. How many of you confirm every facebook friend without thinking?

Now, let’s say you use your birthday or license plate # as a password, or a favorite character. Someone with access to your facebook page will soon know your likes, dislikes, favorite shows/movies, license plate (occasional photo of car), birthdays of spouses and kids, their names, etc. A good technique for your password is to mash 2 words together from the dictionary that have no relation to you, change a letter to a number and add in %%%in the middle to throw off brute force password crackers. The CIA assigns code names from random dictionary words unrelated to the project, to avoid easy guessing.