Minimize your Attack Vectors and Harden your Operating System

It is not advisable to click any link in an e-mail unless you have a utility or your mail client has the ability to show you where the link is pointing to prior to you clicking on it.

This isn’t really applicable to those times when you are getting a link sent to you immediately by a site that you are on, when you’re expecting the link, such as a password recovery or similar. In those cases, you are telling the site to send you a message with a link and you typically receive it instantly after requesting it.

However, that said, you should not rule out the possibility that some brilliant hacker might figure out a way to inject some hijacking code into some credible website’s automated password recovery system and compromise that too.

There are some good hackers out there, some freelance, some just bored software engineers or developers, some criminal, some with no ill intention, and some with the goal of draining your life savings if they can figure out how, and there are some that are state sponsored working for government agencies in various countries. The latter, those bastards can’t be trusted even by the citizens of the countries whose governments they work for and if we’re talking about a nation such as the U.S., they have access to the absolute best-in-class of every kind of hacking tool known to man as well as any and every kind of hardware they could possibly need to do what they do.

A prime example of this is our own FBI, CIA, NSA, and plethora of other TLAs used for different sectors of the IC (intelligence community). Those institutions might have been established with the mission to protect you and keep your country safe, but they have long since been re-tasked with keeping track of your every move and peppering you with militarized propaganda and burying you under it, and doing so in order to manipulate you into doing what they desire for you to do.

If people were smart, they’d all be dismantled because they all have mission creep and they do not serve the purpose now that they were given the authority to carry out from the start. This makes them rogue agencies or rogue institutions, hijacked by corrupt men and women and used against you instead of for you.

Unless you are a celebrity or other public figure, or you are a known wealthy entity or financial institution, if you are targeted by a good hacker then it will most certainly be completely random. Nobody is safe from being hacked though, nobody.

Most people will never have to deal with this, but again, nobody is completely safe from being hacked, because there are a stupid amount of completely random attacks simply trying to get into anything they can find in order to further probe it for anything of value or figure out ways to move covertly and laterally across your network to other devices hooked to it.

Minimize your attack vectors and harden your system, in addition to any software such as antivirus and monitoring applications that you use. Know the system you prefer to use, be it a Linux distro, Mac, Windows, Unix, OSx, fully custom OSs (rare but typically very secure), etc.

Whatever it is that you like, you need to take the time to learn some technical details about it or you are vulnerable to getting pWned and owned, and potentially robbed blind by people who want to know what’s in your wallet. Be proactive in learning how to counter this threat because nobody will ever look out for you like you will, and that is virtually guaranteed.

This is just advice, take it or leave it. That is up to you.