Firewalling Your Phone and Other Things

One android-related item: I've said it before, but you never realize how bad things are until you put a firewall on your phone. This might sound difficult, but hear me out...

Let's take our normal android phone.. you install a cool internet radio app like TuneIn radio. You fire the program up and listen to whatever stations you like. It became my #1 player.

Since my phone met its maker, I had to transfer everything to a new one (whatever you pay for insurance is worth it). LG, in addition to great phones, has a great transfer app. I found this out after I did everything manually on the new phone, because I only know how to do complicated things - I get nervous with anything easy. My original firewall was No Root Firewall, named because you don't have to root your phone to use it. I decided to give Netguard firewall a try.

With a firewall, when you fire up TuneIn Radio, you will get ill seeing where it goes. The firewall shows you every destination. You will see the obvious packets to the radio's domain. Then you'll see a shitload(technical term) of packets going all over the place. Spend any time looking them up and you'll see they're all advertising. So for each call for radio, there are 5 or more ad calls. One of the things about android that pisses me off is the apps are allowed to 'come alive' when they're not being used. TuneIn runs constantly, contacting ad domains. It has absolutely dominated my logs, moreso than goog calls. 

Btw, you don't need goog. You don't need to put in a goog account. You don't have to allow goog outside the phone. Since all apps phone home, the firewall stops them. Many apps don't need any net access at all, yet demand it. If you install a puzzle app, there's no reason it needs access to your phone, camera, storage, and internet access. So stop it with a firewall. You also won't see ads on everything... it's a less automatic ad-blocker.





If you fail to update Win XP(!) and Win 7, you missed the first service pack for XP in forever. This is due to the Bluekeep vulnerability. If you haven't patched yet, stop being a willing idiot.  And if you keep port 3389 (RDP) open to the internet, you're asking for it. And if you use an ancient, non-supported OS, you're asking for it.

Your system is next.




Check out fwbackup. It's a new, open source backup that's simple. I just ran my first backup and it went well. You can select the compression for speed or efficiency.



What happens when you're successfully spearphished?
Your bank account becomes $742k lighter, like the city of Ocala, Florida.