The New Security

A video about the dark web led me to some pretty strange places the last few days. I don't mean strange places on the dark web itself. This is different.

I sometimes do what I call a drunkard's walk through the internet. That's where a random subject will lead me on a chain of discovery that ends up far away from where I started. My favorite example is the night I went from reading about the mutiny on the Bounty and ended up ready to order beekeeping supplies. There's a connection, although it might not be obvious at first.

Something similar happened when I looked into the dark web. I'm not interested in visiting the place myself, but it led me to some other interesting subjects: cryptocurrency and online security.

The cryptocurrency was pretty easy. I finally came to an "Aha!" moment on the subject where I sort of understood how it works, how what seems like "fake money" can actually have real value.

The security issue was different. I try to be careful online. I use strong, separate passwords for separate accounts. I stay off iffy sites. It's hard to get me to click on something.

The result is that in the last ten years or so I've only had one major computer security failure. That was a bad one. I picked up a nasty virus while shopping for air conditioner parts, and I ended up just removing the infected drive and rebuilding from backups. (I still have that drive around, surrounded by masking tape with the word "INFECTED" written on all sides. Maybe some day I'll see if it can be cleaned.)

While I was getting up to speed on more advanced security techniques, something else happened. A guy I follow on YouTube got hacked. Badly. His YouTube account was wiped out along with his Twitter account and several other accounts. All at once, his social media presence was wiped out.

Nasty business.

I'm not superstitious, because that brings bad luck, but seeing this guy get hackstomped while I was reading up on ways to avoid that sort of thing happening to me seemed like an omen. Seemed like time for me to take action.

The result explains the picture at the top. That's been my password vault for years. Every personal password I've ever had going back to the late 1980s is in that book, including my very first online password for a connection to a Wildcat BBS.

GEnie, Compuserve, AOL, Yahoo, banks, affiliate programs, games, social media, years and years of my online presence is in that one book. Some of those accounts I hardly ever used. Some are still active today. Up until now, it seemed like a pretty safe method, but I'm retiring it along with my old password strategies.

I don't know what my new security ecosystem will look like yet, but it should be more robust. You can't protect yourself from everything, but you can protect yourself from a lot, and that's becoming more important these days. Cybersecurity is vital, both at the national and personal level.

I'm still learning, so I can't give specific advice on how to be more secure, but I can certainly suggest that you look into it yourself. Don't be like those idiots who still think "password" is a clever choice for a password. Get serious about your security.

And while you're doing that, I'm going to be browsing through a notebook that documents virtually my entire online history. I've had some good times on the internet.

And I hope to keep having them...