Personal Security Checklist

One thing we've seen from Ukraine is enemy action taking place on information given up by people on the other side who are sloppy with personal and operational security. The presence of smart phones on the battlefield is a goldmine for intelligence.

Here's a list to get started on not being a PERSEC/OPSEC dumbass:

https://github.com/Lissy93/personal-security-checklist

Free Book Download from Sparks 31

I've been following Sparks 31's blog for awhile now, and bought his book Communications for 3%ers and Survivalists. He's decided to make the full text of that book and his other tome, The Modern Survivalist available as one PDF, for free.

https://sparks31.wordpress.com/2015/08/26/free-book-download/

It's worth a gander.

"Technical Glitches." Uh huh.

Unless you were under a rock, you know about the following three things:

1. The Chinese stock market dive.
2. "Technical glitches" grounding all United Airlines flights in the US yesterday.
3. "Technical glitches" causing all trading to be halted for several hours on the New York Stock Exchange yesterday.

On Tuesday, this was tweeted by Anonymous:

Unless the network and system admins at UAL and the NYSE are totally incompetent, they have major redundancy in place to prevent shutdowns like this from happening. There's simply too much money at stake to have single points of failure.

Now, was Anonymous responsible? Perhaps it was someone looking to divert attention from the Chinese stock market meltdown. Whatever really happened I doubt that the powers that be would share the truth, for fear of upsetting the apple cart.

My tinfoil hat feels a bit warm. It would be a good time to revisit your emergency preparations.

Security Vulnerability in Adobe PDF Reader

FYI, because much of the info you download from the Internet is in PDF format.

There is a zero day security exploit for the Adobe PDF Reader that is currently out in the wild and for which there is no patch.  It exploits a vulnerability in Reader’s Javascript implementation.

Details here.

If you must use Adobe Reader you should disable Javascript until this is fixed.

• On Windows, launch Adobe Reader and go to Edit > Preferences > JavaScript and uncheck Enable Acrobat JavaScript.
• On a Mac, launch Adobe Reader go to the Adobe Reader menu > Preferences > JavaScript and uncheck Enable Acrobat JavaScript.
  

Alternative free PDF viewers are Preview.app on Mac (included with OS X), and Foxit Reader on Windows.