I’m awaiting the release of by Brian Krebs' Spam Nation the way many await the new season of Game of Thrones: with delightful dread. We’re all holding our breaths waiting for the fall, all wondering the same question: How bad is the damage?

Of course, I’m assuming there will be many fewer deaths in Spam Nation than GoT, but the truth is there’s no guarantee. Krebs tells us that, “the backdrop of the story is a long-running turf war between two of the largest sponsors of spam. A true-crime tale of political corruption and ill-fated alliances, tragedy, murder and betrayal, this book explains how the conditions that gave rise to this pernicious industry still remain and are grooming a new class of cybercriminals.” Sounds a bit like our friends in the Seven Kingdoms, doesn’t it?

But the ghastly deeds described in Spam Nation are not only based in fact, they also describe a problem very close to home. With all there is to know about all of us splashed on the Internet for all to see, some of the recent revelations from Google, the NSA, and Wikileaks--and those are just the good guys, or in any case the good-ish guys--should, at the very least, be chilling. What’s chilling is how normal it is.

How did this happen? It seems so recently that we were being warned, and warning one another, about what we put online. That first bubble of perceived anonymity had popped, and we were all scrambling to keep our personal information private. Did we stop trying? If so, why?

With cybercrime such a hot topic, Krebs’s book might be coming at just the right time. Then again, maybe any time is right for this wake up call. We, as a nation, and even as a world, seem to have lost any desire for privacy. From incriminating pictures to uploads of paternity tests with the biological father tagged (yes, this has happened), it seems hard to believe that we could go any farther in the direction of publicizing our lives. Our momentum is full-force and we’re already well into the next stage of things: we’ll type credit card information into a site without batting an eye.

Yes, we’re still living in a world riddled with a false sense of security, and it’s as dangerous as ever. Maybe it’s because we’re usually successful in not having our information stolen, maybe it’s because we have too much faith in our antivirus programs, but maybe it’s because having our information stolen just isn’t that bad. It’s happened to everyone. Sony, Netflix, Snapchat, and Facebook have all had security breaches. What this usually means is that we have to change our passwords for those sites. What a hassle. Sometimes, if we’re very unlucky, we might start seeing some funny charges on our credit card bills. If that happens, we have to call the bank, sort the whole thing out, and wait for a new card.

Krebs, I hope, will blast a bit more sense into us.

As he puts it, “Spam Nation isn’t just about junk email; most of the entrepreneurs building and managing large-scale spam operations are involved in virtually every aspect of cybercrime for which there is a classification, including malware development, denial-of-service attacks, identity theft, credit card fraud, money laundering, commercial data breaches and extortion.”



I don't know about you, but I for one am ready to get more serious about my online security practices. I've stopped using one password for all my sites; instead I use Dashlane to keep multiple passwords organized. Is Dashlane secure? It seems to be--or at least, was apparently unhit by the last round of security breaches to hit the news. I'm starting to learn about companies and sites specializing in keeping the barbarians from our digital gates. I've learned about one that does its good work right down the road from me--a site called Pistol Star, which publishes an internet security tool called PortalGuard. PortalGuard specializes in self service password reset education, single-sign and two-factor authentication in

education, health care, and related fields.

With the bad guys scrambling to breach our fortresses and steal our identities, and the good guys not far behind, it's comforting to know that there are still guardians, working to buttress our defenses.

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