Week 8: Progress!

Hey everyone who reads this, all 2 of you. This is week 8 now!

I went on a detour out of state for my sister's wedding (and a pretty sweet trip to Disneyland; we miraculously got into Club 33!) and, quite frankly, it goes without saying that I didn't get as much work done as I had hoped. Lately I've just been trying to find good sources for my project – it's a fairly new topic, which makes scholarly resources and journals hard to come by – as well as narrowing down the questions on the survey I'll be doing soon. I'd really love to keep it multiple choice, as I know people tend to skip over forms or find them intimidating, so I'm trying my best to word the questions in a way that would allow that. Aside from that, there's not much else to report on this week.

On a somewhat relevant note to my project, during that trip my brother and my mom both received suspicious text messages, both claiming that their credit card information had been stolen and containing a link to "verify" their information. Upon closer inspection, that link was to a Google form – something a large credit company would likely not use – and the number the message was sent from appeared to be a local number rather than an automated one (like 555-555-5555 instead of 555-55, etc). This was clearly a phishing attempt, and it's a good thing I managed to spot it.

This poor Nigerian Prince needs your help!
Although it's one of the more obvious attempts (and the butt of
many jokes), phishing is a very real threat. Sometimes they will 
look almost exactly like an official message if you don't pay attention
to the small details, such as numbers, grammar, spelling, links, and so on.

Keep an eye out for strange messages like this, as this is exactly how data breaches can happen and put you and your sensitive data at risk.