Brigada is. We just checked. One guy, evidently in St. Petersburg, Russia (although he could be anywhere in the world, just redirecting through Russia), has tried to log on to our site over 28,000 times so far. We’re not sure what he hopes to find. Articles maybe? : ) Or is he just interested in the challenge of it all? We’re tracking a host of other hackers from France, Brazil, Poland, Spain (that guys from Pamplona — isn’t that where the bulls run?), Latvia, China, Germany, Turkey, and even Red Deer, Canada. (Give us a break. Red Deer? That’s about 50 miles north of Calgary. Wouldn’t it be more fun to go skiing?)
We’re fascinated by hackers. Not sure why. They’re like the vandals who spray paint on the side of railroad cars. We’re not talking about graffiti artists. At least they have a purpose they consider noble (art?). Nope. These hacker dudes are just out to prove they can destroy. Now granted: Many of them want to suck the life out of your digital device or website by using it as a relay point for their spam or porn. But — hey… whatever happened to making an HONEST living by planting a garden and growing corn or something. The whole hacker scene is just creepy. Breaking and entering. Stealing bandwidth. Just ugly all the way around. So what’s a body to do?
Start by downloading the free program, Malwarebytes…
And yes — they sell a premium version that provides always-on protection. But even the FREE version will try to clean up the malware someone has planted on your device. Completely free.
But perhaps even more fundamental: Strengthen your passwords. The guys trying to hack into Brigada have invested THOUSANDS of [most likely automated] attempts in guessing our passwords. If yours are weak, you’re the next target. For this reason, security advisors recommend you NOT use the same password at every site. Please. Just get a program like RoboForm…
and let it “generate” (invent) hard-to-crack passwords for you. Use a different “hard-to-crack,” mumbo-jumbo password on every site — and you only have to remember your one cool password to get into RoboForm!
Of course, you could do more. You could turn off tracking in your browser, disable Adobe Flash, and delete the apps on your phone that you don’t really use. But at the end of the day, perhaps the single most important step might be password security. At least start there. And… pray hard. That guy from St. Petersburg is coming after you next.
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