ETHICAL HACKING NET-185-001N Week 9

This week, I learned more about social engineering.  I learned more about some of the ways that it occurs, and some techniques to guard against it. Some of the ways to avoid malware or phishing websites include Google Safe Browsing (safebrowsing.google.com), which is a service provided by Google and used by several browsers including the popular Google Chrome (naturally) Safari, and Firefox to block known phishing and malware web pages.  It is also used by Vivaldi, since it is based on Chromium (which consists of all the open-source parts of Chrome that are not separate projects) and GNOME Web.  A related project is stopbadware.org which is an organization campaigning against malware, and includes due process provisions so that legitimate sites are not blocked by mistake or due to bad faith actors.  As an additional precaution against phishing (besides a high quality spam filter, which Gmail has) is to use digital signatures for your own e-mail, such as with https://ProtonMail.com, which also supports encrypting the messages between two ProtonMail users, which is done automatically and transparently using open-source software.  As I've said before elsewhere, extensions like Web of Trust (https://www.mywot.com) further help protect individuals against websites with phishing and malware.  While companies providing utility services such as ISPs may need access to the inside of facilities to resolve certain types of problems (and may show up unannounced due to certain types of issues), it is still important to confirm that they are in fact employees of the company that they say they work for and that they do have a legitimate reason for requesting access.  That said, being patient and courteous is important, too.

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