Similar Posts
Hey! Hackers Have my Password!
Remember when the city of Atlanta got held up for ransom by hackers? Or the same thing in the plot of a few movies? Well, ransomware is real, but recently there has been a slew of blackmail spam that has gotten people concerned. I first heard about it from a friend who called me to say that they got a letter demanding ransom and that the letter had one of their passwords in it. I told him to bring in his iMac for us to check out. A few days later, I got that same letter and it had one of my old passwords.
Have you recently gotten an email whose subject line says something like “Change your password immediately! Your account has been hacked.”? If not, it may be only a matter of time before you do. It’s a scary message, especially because it will contain one of your passwords, some threats, and a demand for bitcoins. Worse, the password is likely one you’ve used in the past—how could the hacker have discovered it? Has your Mac really been taken over?
Relax. There’s nothing to worry about.
This “blackmail spam” has been making the rounds on the Internet recently—we’ve heard from several clients who have received it, and we’ve gotten copies too. The message purports to be from a hacker who has taken over your Mac and installed spyware that has recorded you visiting web sites that aren’t exactly G-rated. The hacker also claims to have used your Mac’s camera to photograph you while you’re browsing said non-G-rated sites and threatens to share those pictures with your contacts and erase your drive unless you pay a ransom using Bitcoin.
This blackmail spam has raised so many pulses because it backs up its claims by showing a password that you’ve used in the past. Hopefully, it’s not one that you’re still using, because it was extracted from one of the hundreds of password breaches that have occurred over the past decade. Impacted Web sites include big names such as Yahoo, LinkedIn, Adobe, Dropbox, Disqus, and Tumblr—thieves have collectively stolen over 5.5 billion accounts. Just last week Starwood and Marriot revealed that over ½ billion accounts were compromised. It’s all too likely that some old password of yours was caught up in one of those thefts.
Concerning as the message sounds, all the details other than your email address and password are completely fabricated. Your Mac has not been hacked. There is no malware spying on your every move. No pictures of you have been uploaded to a remote server. Your hard drive will not be erased. In short, you have nothing to worry about, and you should just mark the message as spam.
However, if you’re still using the password that appeared in the message, that is cause for concern. It means that any automated hacking software could break into the associated account, and it must be a weak password if the bad guys were able to decrypt it from the stolen password files. Go to Have I Been Pwned and search for your email address. If it shows up for any breaches, make sure you’ve changed your password for those accounts.
As always, we recommend that you create a strong, unique password for each of your Web accounts. The easiest way to do this is to rely on a password manager like 1Password or LastPass to generate a random password. When Safari asks you if you want to use a “strong” password – say yes! Then, when you want to go back to that site, the password manager can log you in automatically. It’s easier and more secure.
If you’re still concerned about your passwords, call us and we can help you get started with stronger security practices.
Get Stacked
There are two people in this world, those who keep their desktops organized and those who do not. Over the years I’ve learned these two kinds of users are about a 50/50 split and some do fall somewhere in between. By default, sending files directly to your desktop is often an easier option to grab files quickly. However, the number of files sitting on your desktop can quickly add up and take over, eliminating the ease of quickly accessing certain files you might need on a regular basis. The solution has arrived: Stacks. Stacks is a great way to appear completely neat and tidy when perhaps, your desktop is just the opposite.
Apple has used the term “Stack” before, and still does, in relation to how the icons of folders in the dock display, either as normal folders or as a stack of icons with the first on top. Mojave’s new Stacks feature brings that visual approach to the Desktop, organizing icon clutter into neat stacks that you can expand and collapse with a click, working with the revealed icons just as you’ve always done.
In the Finder, the best way to invoke Stacks is by Control-clicking the Desktop and choosing Use Stacks from the contextual menu. If you first click the Desktop, you can also find the commands for Stacks in the View menu: Use Stacks and Group Stacks By. Lastly, if you open the View Options window by Control-clicking the Desktop and choosing Show View Options, you can work with Stacks by choosing from the Stacks By pop-up menu.
When you invoke Stacks, the Finder promptly collects all like icons-even new files, as you create them – together into one of more stacks of icons. Click once on a stack to reveal its contents below. Click again to collapse the revealed icons back into the stack. If you open multiple stacks at once, each subsequent stacks takes over a spot at the top of the screen and expands down. If you don’t show disks on your Desktop, you can get a nice columnar view of what’s on your Desktop.
How does Stacks figure out which files are alike? You determine that by Control-clicking the Desktop and choosing from the Group Stacks By menu. You can create three basic types of Stacks:
- Kind: These stacks are named for the type of file they contain, such as Documents, PDF Documents, Movies, Images, Screenshots, etc.
- Date: With date based collections, each stack’s name and contents depend on what date ranges make sense, such as Today, Previous 7 Days, Previous 30 Days, October, 2017 and so on. The date groupings can key off the date added, last opened, last modified, or created.
- Finder tags: Tag-based stacks are useful only if you regularly assign tags to all your files.
For myself, grouping stacks by kind work the best, but I can see how for some date could work best. It’s really all in your own preferences and you can change things as needed.
How can you control the order of the files within a stack? That’s trickier. Control-click the Desktop, choose Show View Options, and in the View Options windows, choose from the Sort By pop-up menu. I’m partial to Name and Last Modified, but as mentioned earlier, it is what works best for you.
The only minor downside to Stacks, is that it eliminates any spatial memorization you have relied on to find icons on your Desktop. If you are like me, you do rely on this. I would often get frustrated with this method as well, especially if I had too many similar items stored on my desktop. Stacks really does help! Now I just click on the kind of file I am looking for, like a PDF, and then it expands neatly on my desktop. While I did try to keep my icons before in a specific order to memorize, this arrangement was imperfect much of the time as I added and removed icons.
Stacks might not be perfect, but I have found it to be a valuable feature to Mojave. If nothing else, it gives the impression that I am neat and organized!