the Monday Musings column from that consultant bloke

I used to be “an IT Professional”, writing various commercial programmes before moving on the designing, specifying and various other roles in computing. It was fun, a challenge and I enjoyed it. Later in life, having shaken off the shackles of corporate life, I had a number of business ventures for which I did all my own coding in HTML. Enough of the bragging, let’s just say that I have a little knowledge.

Having had an internet presence, in various guises, for more than twenty five years, I am also relatively visible on the web, and that brings all sorts of nonsense to my assorted devices. A couple of hundred emails a day into the spam folders, for example.

I am cautious; at my age I have been around a bit and have learned the hard way that there are people who would like to screw me out of my hard earned cash, so I am fairly good at fending off the scammers. But, as they say, even Homer nods, and I have had a couple of problems over the last month.

The first was one day when I was a bit fed up, and as I scanned through Facebook I saw an advert from one of the guitar shops that I but from regularly. They had a batch of bluetooth speakers at a giveaway price, and I thought that I would have one. Clicking on the link I was interrupted by the Berkshire Belle wanting to impart some news from that morning’s paper, and so I was not paying full attention as I did the necessary and paid my bargain price. Alarm bells were already ringing as the transaction concluded, and subsequent investigation showed that I was not dealing with my guitar friends at all, nor had I bought a speaker. Instead I had paid for some form of subscription, which I cancelled and reported.

That one was my fault entirely, but the more recent one wasn’t. I was at work when I noticed that I had a series of emails telling me that I had successfully changed my LinkedIn password, turned on, and off, 2 stage verification, added a ‘phone number and email address, and so on. I could not deal with that at the time, and so had to do it a little later when I had got home from that day’s assignment. It seems that LinkedIn had already picked up suspicious activity and had suspended my account, and I went through a precess of verifying my ID to the point where I was able to recover the account.

One of the reasons for having moved my remaining web sites over here to WordPress was that my previous hosting company was taken over by a Russian based organisation and I quickly began to have issues with my email accounts being hacked. That brought a variety of things from spam at the lower end, to blackmail threats at the other.

There is a lot of bad stuff out on the internet, and it is very easy to get caught up in it. I’ve been lucky so far, but, as the last month has shown, the ice is very thin.