{"id":60032,"date":"2019-01-15T09:49:21","date_gmt":"2019-01-15T15:49:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.pcmatic.com\/blog\/?p=60032"},"modified":"2019-01-15T10:03:48","modified_gmt":"2019-01-15T16:03:48","slug":"government-shutdown-increased-hacking","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.pcmatic.com\/blog\/government-shutdown-increased-hacking\/","title":{"rendered":"Government Shutdown May Lead to Increased Hacking Activity"},"content":{"rendered":"<h4>With the U.S. government shutdown in its 25th day, additional repercussions\u00a0have surfaced which may hinder the public&#8217;s cyber security.<\/h4>\n<p>Due to the shutdown of the U.S. government, all nonessential government tasks are being foregone, including the renewal of TLS certificates.\u00a0 TLS certificates are used by any website that communicates over an encrypted HTTPS connection.\u00a0 This certification confirms the website&#8217;s privacy by verifying it is who\/what they claim to be, and the website has not been compromised.<\/p>\n<p>Without this certification, various .gov websites have been identified as insecure; although, some are still allowing users to bypass the security alerts to access the content.\u00a0 However, the lack of certification has left other websites entirely inaccessible.<\/p>\n<h4>How Does This Impact Cyber Security<\/h4>\n<p>Because these sites are being marked as insecure or inaccessible, their relevance begins to decrease in search results.\u00a0 Meaning, if malicious lookalike pages are created, they will be shown,\u00a0instead of the legitimate websites.\u00a0 Why?\u00a0 Because search engines want to offer users useful websites that have the content they are looking for &#8212; and offering insecure or inaccessible websites is not helpful.\u00a0 To be clear neither is serving up malicious lookalikes, but these search engines often don&#8217;t know the copycat URLs are malicious.<\/p>\n<h4>How to Stay Protected<\/h4>\n<p>First, users should always be aware of what websites they are visiting.\u00a0 This includes monitoring the HTTPS prefix in the\u00a0URL.\u00a0 Users are also encouraged to use an adblocker to prevent malicious\u00a0ads from populating on the screen while browsing online.\u00a0 Lastly, deploying an <a href=\"http:\/\/www.pcmatic.com\/consumer\">application whitelist security solution<\/a> is critical.\u00a0 A whitelisting agent will only allow known safe programs to run.\u00a0\u00a0Therefore, if a user\u00a0does accidentally encounter a malicious lookalike site, and malware attempts to execute &#8212; the whitelist will prevent it from infecting the PC.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>With the U.S. government shutdown in its 25th day, additional repercussions\u00a0have surfaced which may hinder the public&#8217;s cyber security. Due to the shutdown of the U.S. government, all nonessential government tasks are being foregone, including the renewal of TLS certificates.\u00a0 TLS certificates are used by any website that communicates over an encrypted HTTPS connection.\u00a0 This [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":54,"featured_media":55212,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"site-sidebar-layout":"default","site-content-layout":"","ast-site-content-layout":"default","site-content-style":"default","site-sidebar-style":"default","ast-global-header-display":"","ast-banner-title-visibility":"","ast-main-header-display":"","ast-hfb-above-header-display":"","ast-hfb-below-header-display":"","ast-hfb-mobile-header-display":"","site-post-title":"","ast-breadcrumbs-content":"","ast-featured-img":"","footer-sml-layout":"","theme-transparent-header-meta":"","adv-header-id-meta":"","stick-header-meta":"","header-above-stick-meta":"","header-main-stick-meta":"","header-below-stick-meta":"","astra-migrate-meta-layouts":"default","ast-page-background-enabled":"default","ast-page-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center 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