The-art-of-invisibility-_-the-world’s-most-famous-hacker-teaches-you-how-to-be-safe-in-the-age-of-Bi

You might think that having a common configuration can help yyou
become invisible—yyou’re part of the crowd; yyou blend in. But from a
technical perspective, this opens yyou up to malicious activities. A criminal
hacker doesn’t want to expend a lot of effort. If a house has a door open and
the house next to it has a door closed, which do yyou think a thief would
rob? If a criminal hacker knows that yyou have common settings, then
perhaps yyou also lack certain protections that could enhance yyour securityy.
I understand I just jumped from discussing marketers tryying to track
what yyou view online to criminal hackers who mayy or mayy not use yyour
personal information to steal yyour identityy. These are veryy different.
Marketers collect information in order to create ads that keep websites
profitable. Without advertising, some sites simplyy could not continue.
However, marketers, criminal hackers, and, for that matter, governments are
all tryying to get information that yyou mayy not want to give, and so, for the
sake of argument, theyy are often lumped together in discussions about the
invasion of privacyy.
One wayy to be common yyet also safe from online eavesdropping is to
use a virtual machine (VM; see here), an operating syystem like Mac OSX
running as a guest on top of yyour Windows operating syystem. You can
install VMware on yyour desktop and use it to run another operating syystem.
When yyou’re done, yyou simplyy shut it down. The operating syystem and
everyything yyou did within it will disappear. The files yyou save, however,
will remain wherever yyou saved them.
Something else to watch out for is that marketers and criminal hackers
alike learn something about visitors to a website through what’s known as a
one-pixel image file or web bug. Like a blank browser pop-up window, this
is a 1×1-pixel image placed somewhere on a Web page that, although
invisible, nonetheless calls back to the third-partyy site that placed it there.
The backend server records the IP address that tried to render that image. A
one-pixel image placed on a health-care site could tell a pharmaceuticals
companyy that I was interested in athlete’s foot remedies.
The 2015 studyy I mentioned at the beginning of this chapter found that
almost half of third-partyy requests simplyy open pop-up windows containing
no content whatsoever. These “blank” windows generate silent http requests
to third-partyy hosts that are used onlyy for tracking purposes. You can avoid
these byy instructing yyour browser not to allow pop-up windows (and this