Hello people
From a online security perspective, how viable is the total online passivity tactic against hacking, phishing and whatever else there is of threats and tracking online?
In that concept i mean: to stay as a lurker on the social medias, only posting extremely sparse.
If you get random mails from the bank or other instances you dont follow the links, but rather either phones them, or manually goes to the companys page and loggs in to see if there are any messages on the internal inbox or anything that pops up when logging in.
With the thought in mind, that you cant get attacked, if they dont know you are there, how viable is this tactic?
If you’re connected to the network, you are part of the ecosystem, you are not a passive target, you are a viable target.
If you airgap your computer systems, such that they’re not attached to any network attached to the internet. Then you would have a reasonable amount of isolation, and you could say that’s a very passive stance.
In general, not following links is a good thing, always going to the canonical contact for your banking, and other important resources is good. But I wouldn’t consider that being passive, that’s just data hygiene. If somebody calls you on the phone and says I’m with the government tell me your personal information you go no, send me a letter like the government would. That’s just a reasonable level of paranoia.
And just because you’re not creating content, doesn’t mean the consumption of content doesn’t have risk, you could have a zero day on your image formats, so your forum reader gets exploited and installs malware on your computer. The whole webp format fiasco from last month, you’re always at risk if you’re participating in the ecosystem.
Using the mosaic theory of information security, being a lurker means you’re not divulging information to identify you to users of a social media platform. And there’s benefits to that.
It comes down to your threat model, who you trying to defend against?
Tthe prompt for the question was a conversation yesterday with my coussin, who has just been locked out of his online portfolio by a phishing attack, and who is now upping his security game with microsoft password manager, and online passivity.
But what is some basic tips i could talk with him about? And i could use myself, who have looked at bitwarden for close to half a year, stuck by figuring out a master password, and a healthy dose of paranoia of forgetting it
Fido2 hardware keys. Yubikey is great
Bit warden.
Move the phone number for SMS verification over to Google voice, or Google Fi. Lock down that Google account using the fido2 hardware keys. This basically insulates you from sim jacking for SMS two-factor attacks. Google advanced account protection
If you can afford it, keep a Chromebook around for when you log into sensitive systems, like your investment portfolio. Don’t use the Chromebook for anything else, keep it updated. Only use it for your sensitive things. Chrome OS is very locked down, so it’s a nice secure enclave. And you can buy cheap Chromebooks, just keep them updated. Basically it stays off in your closet until you need to log into a sensitive account, then you turn it on do all the updates, then log into your sensitive account. The benefit of this is even if your main daily driver computer gets compromised, your sensitive computing environment is more secure. You’re less likely to cross contaminate
Summary, use hardware security keys wherever you can, where you can’t use SMS attached to a phone number that can’t be simjacked, use a good password manager like bit Warden. Keep a fairly secure isolated computing environment for your sensitive activities
For additional reading check out surveillance self-defense by the EFF https://ssd.eff.org/
And privacy guides https://www.privacyguides.org/en/