If you’re an IT or cybersecurity professional, or even a knowledgeable amateur, then you’re likely the go-to guy or gal for your extended family’s technological problems.
Your daughter’s PC won’t boot? Grandma clicked a funny link? A cold caller tells your brother-in-law there’s something wrong with his computer? You’re on call to deal with it all.
“It doesn’t matter how much time you’ve invested in your careers,” Rich Mogull, FireMon SVP of Cloud Security and CEO of Securosis, told the audience at the ShmooCon hacker conference in Washington, D.C. earlier this month. “When you go home to visit your friends and family, you’re free IT support.”
Fortunately, “there is literally nobody in the world who is better at protecting our friends and family than us,” added Mogull, who is also senior vice president of cloud security at FireMon and an IANS faculty member. “This is what we do.”
Mogull said the most common attacks against his family members include email-based phishing attacks, browser pop-up notifications delivered through online-ad networks, and cold calls and text messages.
The problem is especially acute with the older members of his family, and probably the older members of your family as well.
“Our elders have been under assault since time immemorial, long before the internet,” Mogull said. “As we age, we’ve accumulated wealth and our cognitive facilities degrade. This makes us more prone to falling for spam and phishing attacks.”
Mogull has come up with five basic ways you as a knowledgeable techie can keep your family members safe from online scammers, crooks and criminals — or, as he put it, “to defend Mee-Maw and Pop-Pop with a laptop.”
1. Get your family members to use Macs.
This isn’t because Macs are better than Windows or Linux machines, Mogull said, but because the default configuration on Macs is very secure. It’s easy to make them even more secure, and Macs are generally user-friendly.
“These are the less technically diligent people in our families,” Mogull said. “Let’s make it as easy as possible for them.”
Mogull also recommended setting your family’s Macs to install applications only from the App Store, to disable software installation from “trusted developers,” and to set yourself up as the administrator for all machines, with remote-login permissions.
He suggested that your family members use Safari instead of Chrome as the default browser and said you should set up iCloud accounts for all users with yourself as the recovery contact — with each iCloud password written down in three different places.
For Windows machines, Mogull suggested setting them up to install applications only from the online Microsoft Store. We would add that your relatives should not have administrative rights on their own Windows machines, even though that’s the default configuration. Instead, make yourself the administrator and make sure you can log in remotely if necessary.
2. Write down passwords in a book.
Password managers are great, Mogull said, but your grandmother won’t have the patience for that. Instead, have your relatives, especially older ones, keep passwords in a notebook, with a different page for each account. List all previous passwords for an account along with the current one.
“The problem I’ve encountered with some family members is they’ll do new passwords, and they’ll forget the old password, or they’ll have crossed it out,” Mogull said. “Don’t cross it out. Just leave ’em all in the book, and you pick the one at the bottom of the list.”
It may seem counterintuitive, but Mogull said that your relatives’ passwords should contain only numbers, lowercase letters and the recognizable special characters. Capital letters will be confusing.
3. Use NextDNS.
Mogull called NextDNS “the most effective and important piece of what I do.” This DNS-filtering service blocks malicious websites, browser trackers and many ad networks, and can screen out family-unfriendly sites. The free version of NextDNS gives you up to 300,000 DNS queries per month, while the unlimited version costs $20 per year.
You can configure most routers to use NextDNS, and Mogull said he had that setup at home. But he has his remote family members instead use the OS-level software agents, which are available as GUIs for Mac, Windows, iOS and Android and as command-line tools for most versions of Linux and BSD as well as some router firmwares.
4. Use the Kagi search engine.
At $20 per month for a family plan, this paid, ad-free search engine isn’t quite as affordable as NextDNS, but Mogull plans to make it the default search engine for all his relatives.
“I have had incidents where family members are searching for things like recipes and they get to go on all these scam sites and everything else,” Mogull said. “The combination of Kagi and NextDNS is really helping me.”
5. Get your relatives to learn three things by heart.
The most important things your family members need to remember, Mogull said, are:
- No legitimate company will ever ask for a password or bank account number over the phone or via email.
- No legitimate company will ever call you because “they detected a problem” on your computer.
- Never install anything someone asks you to download, even if it’s a legitimate software package.
“I’ll install it for you,” Mogull says. “No one cares that something is wrong with your computer except me.”
“These five things alone have wiped out any close calls that I have had with my family,” he added. “I haven’t had any close issues in quite a while now.”
