INDEX	February 22, 2023
Hackers tricks to obtain passwords
I have three Macs right now. One of them seems to have died, but it's fairly old. The newest has this tendency to come up with ridiculous excuses to get me to enter my password for the machine. Today it reckoned the battery was flat so it just threw up a dark screen and refused to let me do anything. So I obediently plugged in the charger and it re-started, though I had to enter my password again. Now I knew perfectly well that this was rubbish because I happened to have noticed that the battery level was at 48%. What had happened was a fake start up had been engineered in order to capture my password. So obviously the first thing I did was change my password. No problems. The thing that bothers me is if the hackers can control the machine even before I enter my password, what do they want the password for? Mac has a highly secure method of capturing and storing passwords. What they are attempting to do is capture the password before I enter my identity. At that point they have control since they have produced the screen, making it look like the Mac opening screen. Once I have entered my identity I feel relatively safe, though I do not use Google's password storing system in Chrome (or at least I do not usually use it). Of course you can crash a Mac and reinstall the os, but the problems I am getting over and over again are clearly down to hacking. I use half a dozen different computers, mostly Macs or Chromebooks. They are all constantly attacked. It is not the machines it is the bastards out there who are paid to make life impossible. If you were watching Michael Palin tonight you will have heard what he had to say about the Stasi. Almost every word could have been said about British so called intelligence.
INDEX Jonathan Brind		February 22, 2023