Good to hear you guys are on the ball, and particularly good advice, ORB.

I do actually use my own postcode when searching Autothingy, but I remove it if posting links elsewhere.

Slightly unrelated, but we had an incident locally a few years back where the staff in a petrol station were using a cloning machine to duplicate debit cards being used by customers to pay for fuel, then employing the cloned cards to fund illicit purchases and other activities. My son was done to the tune of about 100 quid but he did get it back, eventually. Talk was that these guys were using the money to raise money for the Tamil Tigers. It was a small chain of about 3 garages, and the boss was eventually prosecuted and, I think, jailed.

ORB gives good advice here.

I would add: don't ever allow websites to save your credit card details. When mine was used to purchase bitcoin in several transactions (which I fortunately picked up very quickly), the c/c company told me it was likely someone had compromised one of the websites I had used to make a purchase. I was reimbursed, by the way.

Secondly, if you're using Windows 10, raise your privacy options to the maximum. Go to Windows Settings > Privacy and review everything there. It's a very long list - go through the whole thing patiently and switch off as much as you can, making sure you understand the implication of each option.

Thirdly, don't just switch off your camera; when you're not using it put masking tape over it if it's a laptop (even Zuckerberg of Facebook fame does this), or put the shutter down if it's attached to your PC.

I will not have anything to do with Siri, Cortana or Alexa.

I use CCleaner to get rid of all cookies etc. every evening before shutting down the PC, and also back up all data to a separate hard drive that is not plugged in until the last moment.

Make sure your anti-virus is up to date and do periodic scans with something like Malwarebytes.

Be very careful not to click on links to anything you don't expect or don't understand, especially if it's an e-mail. At the moment I'm plagued by dodgy-looking messages saying my Apple account needs updating or whatever. As I don't have an account with Apple I don't react, except to report them as phishing.

Edited by FP on 22/12/2017 at 13:20