From time to time I get told off by one or more subscribers, for getting involved in things I shouldn’t! It rather misses the point: that doctors should get involved with anything that isn’t as it should be. Holism means TOTAL health, don’t you know.
One day I got to thinking about “Internet health”. I made that up and, no, I don’t mean health ON the Internet; I mean health OF the Internet.
I was all fired up to do a piece on Google (which is a nasty, contagious disease). New Scientist recently ran a piece, pointing out the dangers of downloading images via Google. Apparently, that’s the latest loophole the hackers are exploiting, to get malware onto your computer.
It’s a war out there and what you see on Yahoo and Google searches is the top 5% of a seething cesspit of crime, fraud, filth and malware. You wouldn’t want to see the half of it. The search engine spiders do their best to keep it out of view.
But talk about pathogens! These evil hacker bugs and human parasites out there are trying to infect your healthy life.
Anyway, the point is that I shifted my attention away from this, somewhat. I got hacked at the alternative-doctor.com website. Someone had planted malicious code and Google has now flagged it as a compromised site. In this case I know who did it and the police are closing in on her now.
But that doesn’t help clean up the mess.
Then Viv got her Yahoo account hacked. Dear Viv isn’t so computer literate and I hadn’t realized she was using her Yahoo account for some of her office work. The result is that the hackers got a list of email addresses that includes my customers. I can only apologize that many of you are now receiving spam of a sexual nature.
It’s too late for us to close the door (meaning, I’m afraid, you have to block them yourselves).
But the real culprit is that moronic system of Yahoo’s. It’s very easy to hack and has NO real safeguards. I went into Viv’s A/C and looked at recent log ins. Someone had logged in twice in an hour from Germany, then Malaysia, and all the while Viv herself was logging in from California.
Yahoo is too badly set up, busy making money on its advertising, to bother with little details like this. Yet it’s such an obvious red flag. It would have taken nothing (except a bit of real care) to have their coders demand extra log in proof when it saw inconsistencies like this.
If you have a Yahoo.com email, I advize you to dump it immediately and get a gmail or similar*. You are at risk and Yahoo doesn’t seem to care.
Read this piece here, which repeats what I just told you:
http://www.blindfiveyearold.com/yahoo-email-hacked
*PS. Don’t forget to sign back into my subscriber list with your new email address!