Spencer Heckathorn

It's the new thing for cyber bad guys and it's really not that new. However, clickbait has taken on a whole new life in the age of digital friendships and sharing of content. If you need an authoritative definition you can check out Wikipedia - clickbait. The biggest thing you can see is when you are on your phone and you click a link but when you get to the page instead of seeing the content you had hoped for, you instead see a screen full of ads. Unethical bad guys use machine learning to optimize titles or find the just right picture to get you to click on the content, from there they can automatically share the content on your Facebook or twitter account. They also hope that you will hit that share button if you like what they have, you have been caught by clickbait. Even I get caught all the time by clickbait, I will be on Facebook and something interesting looking will popup, I click it and then I am looking for the close button cause I can't click it fast enough. The other annoying part is that many normal sites move to a model of posting the same kinds of ads in mass thinking that we will just deal with it. I make a device that can block ads on your home network for all your devices, however, it won't come out until later this year and it will only work while you are at home or work where you install the device. I think everyone hates these types of ads, and content in general. That is why I say the first sign you are on a bad site is tons of ads that block the page or make impossible to see the content that brought you to the site in the first place. Another trend we see that only seems to be growing is the infection of many computers via advertising. We see this over and over. Even this morning before I knew I would write about this topic I was click on news stories to see what is going on in the world of cyber, and I was served a suspicious ad, my computer was able to block the payload, but most computers are not set up like mine. Just remember as part of our yearly service we block all ads on your computer or laptop.

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Posts by Spencer Heckathorn