Hahnemuehle "This connection is not private"

[Alan Goldhammer]

Alan, why do you think/know this is the case? Is the emoji meant facetiously?

This, it was a tongue in cheek response.  That being said, my own personal feeling is that virtually everything is already out there and all we can do is carefully monitor financial accounts to make sure that we are not be robbed blind.

[Alan Goldhammer]

Doug, I really appreciate this contextualization and your pointing me to Brian Krebs. And I had never seen the expression "cracked software."

Thank you.

Krebs on Security:  https://krebsonsecurity.com/

the other good one that I look at daily is:  https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/  which has useful tutorials if your computer ever does get infected.

I learned programming back in the mainframe days and still do a little bit of it.  I always pay for software that I use, downloading from the vendor's site.  The user is always the best defense against problems:  e.g., don't visit dodgy website or click on links in emails that you known nothing about. 

[Jeffrey Saldinger]

Thanks for both of these, Alan.

[FabienP]

When browsing the internet, I would also recommend using a DNS provider that filters sites known to host malware. One such free service is Quad9. They have guides how to reconfigure your Mac / PC to benefit from this filter.

I have recently switched to them when reconfiguring my pfSense router to perform DNS searches over TLS.

Cheers,

Fabien

[Jeffrey Saldinger]

Thanks for pointing out these extra resources for me to look into, Fabien.