- In this edition: AI is amazing, but here’s proof it’s not always accurate.
- Heads up, parents: ChatGPT will begin adding adult content this month.
- Sharing lots of your life on social media? Here’s what can happen.
Cybersecurity News You Can Use
Keep this in mind as the big holiday online shopping season begins. Scammers are impersonating Amazon support via phone and text, claiming there’s a fraudulent charge or a refund due to the customer. Their goal: trick you into revealing your bank password.
Amazon sends emails about returns and refunds; for example, you’ll receive a confirmation when a return is processed and when your refund is issued. However, Amazon will never call, text, or email you to ask for your banking password or sensitive financial information to receive a refund
If you get a message requesting personal details or urging you to click a suspicious link, treat it as a scam: don’t reply, and delete the message. When in doubt, check your refund status by signing in to your Amazon account directly, not through links in messages.
8% of children in the US and Canada now use ChatGPT regularly. Parents, take note: later this month, the next ChatGPT update will allow interaction with more “spirited” personalities, complete with emojis and banter. And once age limits are in place, the company plans to allow “erotica for verified adults.”
You’re familiar with these. They’re called “CAPTCHAs” and they’re designed to prove you’re a real human before you can log into a website.
Did you know CAPTCHA is an acronym for “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart?” Now you do.
One more thing...
Ask Us About Cyber
If I scan a dodgy QR code, at what point will it affect me? At the point of scanning the QR code or is it where it takes you and you still need to give details to be scammed? My 13-year-old ask me, and I couldn’t answer it.
Just scanning a dodgy QR code does not harm your device. The risk comes from what happens next: if the code leads you to a malicious website, prompts you to enter sensitive information, or asks you to download something, that’s when you can be scammed or infected with malware. Most QR code attacks trick you into giving away your details or downloading bad apps after scanning, not when you point your camera at the code.
I’ve started getting invitations on my Google Calendar at home from people I don’t know. Some are even disgusting. How did this happen? What can I do to stop it?
This is an annoying problem for a lot of us. Scammers collect email addresses from data breaches like last month’s big Salesforce hack, dark web marketplaces, social media, data brokers, and automated email‑harvesting bots.
They use that data to exploit Google Calendar’s setting that automatically adds events from anyone who sends an invitation, letting them insert fake or explicit events with malicious links directly onto users’ calendars. These are designed to trick us into clicking links to fraudulent or adult sites or sharing sensitive information.
To stop them, open your Google Calendar → Settings → Event settings → Add invitations to my calendar…and change it to “Only if the sender is known” or “When I respond to the invitation in email”.
In last month’s article about how bots flooded social media with posts about Cracker Barrel changing their logo, you said, “for social media users, the Cracker Barrel case is a reminder: a lot of what you see on social media is being created by a computer to engage you and make you mad.” It would be great to have some more context here. What do the scammers gain by this?
Bots flood social media with posts because it’s one of the fastest ways to reach huge numbers of people and grab attention. They stir up drama to make posts go viral, either by making users mad, confused, or eager to join in. That keeps everyone scrolling, sharing, and talking about the topic. Scammers, often based in other countries, cash in by sending you to ad-heavy or scammy websites, influence what people believe or vote for, build an audience for future scams, or just keep everyone fired up so they’ll see more ads or sponsored content the scammers profit from later.
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