The Most Important Advice of the Course

Many of you know well that knowledge is the key to protecting your data in the digital space. In this chapter, I would like to show that not only knowledge is important: awareness of current vulnerabilities and threats, information about updates, and new types of attacks are equally, if not more, important.

In Telegram, we have three main channels:

CyberYozh – our main channel where we publish information about new videos and articles;

Hacker’s TOYS – where we publish various useful tools and services from anonymous calls to checking photos for modifications;

ITsec NEWS – a channel where regular compilations of news related to IT security are published.

At the time of writing this article, the CyberYozh channel had about 40 thousand subscribers, while the ITsec NEWS channel had just over four thousand. And this is quite strange. In this chapter, I will briefly describe the latest threats that we discussed on the news channel and the consequences for those who do not keep up with the information.

Some of you know and use the SHAREit program, which allows data transfer between Android devices. Recently, a vulnerability was discovered in this program that allowed remote access to files on the user's device. If you use the program and do not read the news, your files may no longer be just yours. It must be uninstalled immediately.

Another example of important news is related to VK. When deleting a profile on the social network, you probably assume that your photos are no longer accessible to anyone, however, as it was recently revealed, this is not entirely true. A vulnerability was discovered in VK that allowed viewing photos from deleted pages, and this vulnerability has already been exploited to obtain data.

We all want to protect our conversations from being read by third parties and use various solutions for this, one of which is the Matrix service. Just recently, the service's servers were hacked twice by hackers, who copied the database with passwords of almost five and a half million users of the service. This was not the best choice for secure communication.

Sometimes we have to choose new technology, particularly a computer and a mobile phone. In this case, it is useful to be aware of the latest news, as just recently Nokia was caught sending data to China. Huawei also made headlines in a CIA report for cooperating with Chinese intelligence services.