About the Talk:
Along with malware infecting your computer and hackers attempting to con you, your data on the Web is also at risk from breaches beyond your control. Facebook (March 2021), Microsoft (January 2020), Capital One (July 2019), Marriott (November 2018), Twitter (May 2018), Yahoo (September 2016) and even MyHeritage (June 2018) have experienced massive breaches in which millions of customer records were exposed.
Wars have always provided laboratories for testing and improving weaponry and tactics. Cyberwar is no different. State actors and private cyber warriors are likely to come out of the Russian war on Ukraine more capable and dangerous. Russian cyberwarriors are certainly learning ways to circumvent the defenses that Ukrainian volunteers are able to create and so will be better prepared to overcome our cyber-defenses.
Even in the absence of bad actors, computers become corrupted and storage devices fail resulting in the potential loss of years of genealogical research. This talk discusses the risks, the myths, ways to reduce the likelihood of being hacked and how to minimize the impact of hacks and breaches that do occur.
About the Speaker:
Hal is a retired information systems professional who continues to instruct at the university level. He has been actively researching his genealogy for more than three decades, identifying over 4,000 relatives and tracing two lines to the mid-1700s in modern Ukraine. He is a past president of the JGS of Los Angeles and of the International Association of Jewish Genealogical Societies. Hal publishes a series of monthly articles on safe computing which are freely available at http://www.tinyurl.com/SafeComputingArticles. He and his wife, Marci, were raised in the Catskills of New York State. After attending New York University and a four-year stint in the US Air Force in Colorado Springs, they have lived in the Los Angeles area.