Four Tips To Keep Hackers From Publishing Your Emails, From An Actual ‘White Hat Hacker’

For Watch Dogs 2, we spoke with a ‘White Hat Hacker’ about how to stay protected online (and the surprise upside to a ‘President Trump’ for the information security industry).

With Donald Trump about to take over America’s considerable surveillance system, it’s time to ask: Do we need to pull a Sandra Bullock and get off the grid for good?

We asked Chris Gatford, director of HackLabs in Sydney and a self-proclaimed ‘White Hat Hacker’ who helps companies find vulnerabilities in their computer systems.

“I think a Trump presidency – I can’t even believe I’m saying this – might actually be good for the information security industry.”

Let the man explain.

“We might hear more about who is attacking the U.S. and how, whereas previously they used to be a little bit tight-lipped about all that,” he explained.

“There’s no secret: the DNC hack, Russia was behind it. There’s no secret that China has infiltrated many, many organisations in the U.S., and government departments, over the years.

“Obama’s hinted but not always fully disclosed some of these items. It would be good if we did see that getting talked about more often in the public space and by official channels. That way we’d understand how bad the problem is.”

If you were looking for an upside to a President Trump, there you go.

Gatford is out on the hustings for Watch Dogs 2, the new video game in which punters play as Marcus, a young hacker who finds himself unfairly profiled and accused of a crime he didn’t commit.

Though he’s not affiliated with the game, Gatford is keen to spruik its message: that ‘hacking’ can be used for good – and that there are steps we can take to protect ourselves from the more nefarious hackers out there.

“Hacking’s not necessarily a bad thing,” he said.

“Hacking is bending computers to your will, so it depends what you do.

“We have ‘Black Hat Hackers’ who are out there specifically trying to compromise systems to be able to gain access to information, to be able to make a living from it. We have people like myself, people that hack systems and we call ourselves ‘White Hat Hackers’ sometimes. And we have some people in between, such as ‘hacktivists’, who try to compromise information so that they can expose it, such as Marcus does in the game.”

Gatford says most hacks are the result of people publishing information online that can be used against them.

“If people leave a lot of information around online, it makes it easier to guess the credentials of that person,” he said.

Consider your ‘security questions’, which are the prompts you usually receive when you’ve forgotten a password. Often it’s your mother’s maiden name, or your first pet, or your high school.

“I can see on your Facebook profile you attended your reunion at this high school… and if you’ve made that post publicly available, I can reset your password using the secret question,” he said.

Gatford also cited “phishing emails” – which encourage you to enter log-in details onto lookalike sites, or to download a fake update – as a common entry point for hackers.

Oh, and if you’re a Mac user, don’t fool yourself into thinking you’re running an impenetrable system.

“There’s no shortage of things these days that can get hacked,” he added.

“Macs get malware. We’ve seen cars getting hacked recently. You can hack all sorts of devices in the house, like locks.”

Thankfully, Gatford offered four tips that can (mostly) protect you from being hacked. (DNC, take note.)

1. “Never put anything online that you’re not prepared to print out and stick to the front of your house.”

2. “Always keep your system updated. Pay the hundred bucks for the software licence and run the latest version.”

3. “Make sure that you’re running good antivirus… Sophos, for example, they have a free version available online and so do many of the major AV vendors.”

4. “Just educate everybody who’s gonna use your machine, because there’s going to be so many different people using your machine. There’ll be your kids using it, your wife using it, for example, or your parents come over and want to use it, or you have a visitor in your house. They all have to follow the same computing tips. They have to think before they click.”

Those steps may not keep presidents out, but they're a start.

Watch Dogs 2 is now available on Playstation 4 and Xbox One.

Photo: Ubisoft.