217
votes
Is it safe to pay bills over satellite internet?
Satellite is not safe. Neither is cell data, wifi, or cable Internet. None of it is safe at the layer that you are talking. And that's not the layer that needs to be safe.
It's the data that goes ...
- 134k
75
votes
Accepted
Was Goggle.com actually crazy malware in 2006?
Let me summarise what you are seeing:
someone navigates to a typo-squat site (goggle.com)
the browser is then flooded with numerous pop-ups, warning windows, etc.
eventually, the anti-virus starts to ...
- 134k
51
votes
Can my ISP censor my internet?
Generally speaking, your ISP can't censor Tor or VPNs except by blocking them altogether.
Since you are also "censored" when using Tor and a VPN, it's more likely that either the search ...
39
votes
Is it safe to pay bills over satellite internet?
I would like to specifically address the question on why security of the underlying mode of communication is not as important as the encryption of the message.
You are communicating with your bank to ...
- 541
26
votes
Accepted
How do I hide the OS I am using from internet sites?
It is not currently possible to hide the type of OS from a website
A solution against general fingerprinting and obtaining more specific information about your system is to use Tor Browser with the ...
- 436
26
votes
How can a service like Fastly have such an impact on the Internet?
The internet is not as decentralized as you might think. A small number of companies that provide CDN and WAF services (e.g. Fastly, Amazon AWS, Cloudflare, Akamai) serve a disproportionate amount ...
- 25k
25
votes
Accepted
What prevents random software installation popups from mis-interpreting our consents
What you describe is called scareware and is a kind of malware.
Malware authors don't care about their reputation (except maybe their reputation among criminals), nor are they bound by any usability ...
- 38.2k
17
votes
Can my ISP censor my internet?
Yes, an ISP can restrict your access to the internet. And they do it.
Here are some examples of how they can do it. I added a quick list at the end of what one can do to prevent their ISP to tamper ...
- 1,558
16
votes
How can a service like Fastly have such an impact on the Internet?
It's all about getting Internet content to the end users (us) as quickly as possible. To make this happen firms like Fastly, Akamai, etc - called Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) - work with content ...
- 161
16
votes
What prevents random software installation popups from mis-interpreting our consents
When you normally install software from a website, you download a file from the website and run it. Your computer probably says "This file came from the internet, are you sure you want to run it?&...
- 35.6k
13
votes
Accepted
Is it possible to detect VPN in the network?
The OpenVPN protocol makes no attempt to hide its presence. The protocol itself is briefly described at the end of the documentation. Note that, even if you manage to obfuscate the protocol itself, it ...
- 67.8k
13
votes
Can my ISP censor my internet?
Your ISP cannot censor the internet with anything finer than entire DNS hostname or IP address granularity. They cannot modify Google search results or interfere with your ability to use Google short ...
11
votes
How do I hide the OS I am using from internet sites?
So, there is different information leaking when requesting a website (from the user agent, the source port of your TCP connection to the TTL on your TCP packets.
A few good steps in the right ...
- 14.5k
11
votes
Accepted
Secure DNS (DoH, DoT) differences, performance, comparison
DNS over HTTPS and DNS over TLS offer equivalent security in terms of encryption and integrity. That's because HTTPS is essentially HTTP over TLS. There are certainly various versions of TLS and ...
- 9,837
10
votes
Is it safe to pay bills over satellite internet?
The physical support you use to transport the information doesn't make it more or less secure. Communications nowadays are all encrypted using protocols such as TLS. This means that the information ...
- 541
8
votes
Accepted
What information is still exposed when visiting an HTTPS website using DNS over TLS?
What information about the user's browsing is in principle available to each of the following, if they cared to access it?
Since your question is asking about DNS over TLS, I'm not going to get into ...
- 364
8
votes
Accepted
Is there a security benefit from adding a dedicated router to a network of 1 PC?
I think your view on the situation is largely correct.
A router typically provides network address translation (NAT), giving your computer an RFC1918 address such as 192.168.0.2. This has the security ...
- 35.6k
7
votes
Accepted
Is There Any Risk When Visiting Websites Without Secure Connections If You Don't Enter Personal Info?
There are some risks to HTTP sites even if you're not entering data.
There is the privacy risk, as others have pointed out. Someone in a position to observe your traffic can see a lot more about what ...
- 198
6
votes
Accepted
Can restarting a router result in its software being updated?
Short answer: It erases the volatile memory, which is where the plug-ins are stored that you're referring to. This was what was doing the heavy-lifting of the malware.
To fully get rid of malware, ...
- 740
6
votes
Accepted
Windows 7 consent.exe attempting to access the internet
You asked 1) if consent.exe is a legitimate program, 2) if its use of the network is legit (why does it attempts to connect to an external server), and 3) if there is any reason to allow it.
Your ...
- 176
6
votes
Accepted
What is MITM attack in terms of implementation?
Technically, they can be anywhere in the network. But a lot depends on the attacker, their capabilities, and their goals.
Some of the easiest Person In The Middle (PITM) attacks can be done with a ...
- 35k
6
votes
Is it safe to pay bills over satellite internet?
For HTTPS sites, you should have little to worry about. Most websites especially important sites that handles personally sensitive data like banking and emails are running on HTTPS nowadays.
If you'...
- 31.8k
6
votes
What prevents random software installation popups from mis-interpreting our consents
With modern operating systems and Internet browsers, any "random" popup cannot actually install anything, no matter what you click in it.
The operating system and browser quarantine each ...
- 357
6
votes
What prevents random software installation popups from mis-interpreting our consents
Nothing - and it probably will
These ads are not interested in consent. They're all scams, every one of them, without exception. What they're interested in is having a gullible human on the other end, ...
- 845
5
votes
Accepted
Are revealed personal emails a security risk?
There are some downsides to having your email spread to strangers:
The more spread your email is, the more likely you are to get spam, phishing emails, emails containing malware, etc. If anyone of ...
- 65.9k
5
votes
Is it safe to pay bills over satellite internet?
If we disregard that all payments should go over https and be encrypted, it would probably be easier to wiretap a cable than intercepting what you send upwards to the satellite.
- 229
5
votes
Does HSTS provide security advantages on private networks?
and assuming no systems or components on that network are compromised
...and assuming that nobody who has access to the systems or the networks has any bad intentions and can be trusted with ...
- 18.9k
5
votes
Accepted
How is my school blocking new Internet traffic after midnight?
It looks like they add a rule to the firewall to deny outgoing connections. Since it is a stateful firewall, any new traffic is a new "connection". Existing traffic streams are unaffected ...
- 134k
5
votes
If the connection is encrypted, is it still unsafe to login at a public network?
Public networks make it easy to get a MitM position. TLS (the security protocol underlying HTTPS) is secure against MitM by design, but neither software nor users are perfect executors of good ...
- 53.9k
Only top scored, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible