JTF Safety and Privacy Information FAQ - Please read!

[Shlomo]

1. Is it safe to register with JTF.org? Is the site safe? How private is it?

Yes, it is absolutely safe to become a member!

JTF is 100% legal in every way. We follow every letter of the law. There is absolutely nothing to fear. We are a legally incorporated organization recognized by the government.

Furthermore, we will never give your information out to other web sites, other companies, other organizations, or third parties. Your information (the tiny bit that we have) stays on our server.

It's also good to know that we do not store or record your password. We use the latest technology to store only a unique code that is generated from your password. This code (using the same algorithm the Canadian government uses) is impossible to reverse engineer.

2. Does JTF use any tracking cookies or do you track people visiting the site?

No. We will never use tracking cookies, and we do not track people who simply visit and read the site. Obviously, the only exception to this rule is if you attack our site (which then the IPs are given to the correct authorities for legal prosecution).

3. When I log in to the website, does my password travel across the internet so that others could see it?

No. When you log into our website, your password is scrambled using the latest ultra-secure encryption technologies (the same used by the government) before it is ever sent across to our server.

So no, your password is NEVER sent plain text across the internet. You are completely safe logging into our forum.

4. Has anyone ever been "hacked"?

No. Never!

No one on our site has even been hacked using our site or any of the information from our site.

No one has ever gotten a virus, spyware, malware, or even a tracking cookie from our site.

5. How do I protect myself online?

When you choose a password:

• Make them long and impossible to guess
• Use a number
• Use at least one punctuation

It is good practice to change your password from time to time. To change your password, click on "PROFILE" on the top and then "Account Related Settings" on the left or click here.

For search privacy, use https://ixquick.com instead of Google for your searches.

Use Mozilla Firefox and install these addons:

Adblock Plus
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/adblock-plus/
Block all ads automatically making browsing faster and safer.

Beef Taco
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/beef-taco-targeted-advertising/
Sets permanent opt-out cookies to stop behavioral advertising for 100+ different advertising networks, including Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, all members of the Network Advertising Initiative, and many other companies.

BetterPrivacy
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/betterprivacy/
Ever wondered why you are still tracked though you tried everything to prevent it? BetterPrivacy is a safeguard which protects from usually not deletable LSO's on Google, YouTube, Ebay and more.

Ghostery (My personal favorite!)
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ghostery/
Protect your privacy. See who's tracking your web browsing (over 90% of the sites online do!) and block them with Ghostery.

HTTPS-Everywhere
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
Encrypts your communications with a number of major websites

If you wish to encrypt your entire connection to our website (for example if you wish to log in from a public computer, internet cafe, or library), you can use https but you will be prompted to accept our security certificate. The only reason you are prompted to accept our security certificate is that we do not pay money to a huge multi-national corporation for it. Rest assured, it is just as secure!

Lastly (and obviously), never give out your login information to anyone.

More information can be found on protecting your online identity here:
https://www.eff.org/wp/effs-top-12-ways-protect-your-online-privacy

6. Do you recommend any good and free virus scanners and anti-spyware tools?

Yes. Scan your computers regularly for viruses. Many rootkits, keyloggers, and such can monitor everything you do and send all this information to a remote server.

There are many wonderful FREE antivirus products available that are just as good or better than many paid-for versions:

Avira AntiVir Personal Free Antivirus
http://www.avira.com/en/avira-free-antivirus

Avast Free Antivirus
http://www.avast.com/free-antivirus-download

Never use Norton Semantic or McAfee! If you do, uninstall them and use one of the products above. While over a decade ago, these products were the best, today they are the worst on the market and leave you wide open.

In addition to scanning for viruses, you will ALSO need to scan for spyware and malware that send your personal data, web history, contacts, passwords, etc to other companies or servers on the internet.

Malwarebytes' Anti-Malware is free and one of the best out:

http://malwarebytes.org/mbam.php

7. When (not if) JTF is attacked, how does this affect me?

The vast majority of attacks we receive are called DoS attacks. You can bet that almost 100% of the time, we are under these types of attacks and have become very efficient in stopping them.

A denial-of-service attack (DoS attack) or distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS attack) is an attempt to make a computer resource unavailable to its intended users. It does not involve "hacking into" our website. One common method of attack involves saturating the target machine with external communications requests, such that it cannot respond to legitimate traffic, or responds so slowly as to be rendered effectively unavailable. In general terms, DoS attacks are implemented by either forcing the targeted computer(s) to reset, or consuming its resources so that it can no longer provide its intended service or obstructing the communication media between the intended users and the victim so that they can no longer communicate adequately.

Denial-of-service attacks are illegal in almost every country and violate the acceptable use policies of virtually all Internet service providers. We will prosecute for attacks to the full extent of the law. DoS attacks are a felony and many people have served prison sentences when they have been caught.

8. Why does JTF get attacked?

Because our enemies do not want you to see the truth. They would rather censor the internet and take away your right to see the information on this site.

[JTFenthusiast2]

I was convinced that with McAfee, I was really protected.  So it turns out that McAfee stinks? 

Thanks for all of your help and concern, Shlomo

[Spiraling Leopard]

It is best to 'internet' on a guest-account on your computer. A guestaccount has no authority to install software, so nothing bad will install without you knowing it.

[BritishSword]

Oh new privacy goodies!
I love you.

[Spiraling Leopard]

Probably nothing new, but:

http://www.ehow.com/how_2155812_block-ddos-attacks-pc.html

[Shlomo]

If Firefox is preventing you from visiting our website with encryption using https, then simply follow the instructions on the following page:

https://picobit.wordpress.com/2009/12/20/fix-firefox-the-certificate-is-not-trusted-because-it-is-self-signed-error/

[ShoShanna]

Wow, there is more information about saftey than i could have ever asked for. I will be busy tomorrow getting my computer caught up.
  Thanks for the very generous info from your research and experience.

[JTFenthusiast2]

Wow, there is more information about saftey than i could have ever asked for. I will be busy tomorrow getting my computer caught up.
  Thanks for the very generous info from your research and experience.

I like the old days when all you needed to think was "macafee" and you were covered, end of story.

[Shlomo]

"With all this [Sony] customer data now unfortunately out there for public viewing, I thought it would be interesting to do some analysis on password practices. There are some rather alarming (although not entirely surprising) findings including: 36% of passwords appear in a common password dictionary. 50% of passwords are 7 characters or less. 67% of accounts on both Sony and Gawker use the same password. 82% of passwords are lowercase alphanumeric of 9 characters or less. 99% of passwords don't contain a single non-alphanumeric character."

http://it.slashdot.org/story/11/06/06/1321257/A-Brief-Sony-Password-Analysis

And on the topic of the "LulzSec" hackers that hacked Sony and FBI affiliate Infragard, they were quoted as saying:

"It has come to our unfortunate attention that NATO and our good friend Barrack
Osama-Llama 24th-century Obama have recently upped the stakes with regard to hacking.
They now treat hacking as an act of war. So, we just hacked an FBI affiliated website
(Infragard, specifically the Atlanta chapter) and leaked its user base. We also took
complete control over the site and defaced it, check it out if it's still up...

While not very many logins (around 180), we'd like to take the time to point out that all
of them are affiliated with the FBI in some way. Most of them reuse their passwords in other places,
which is heavily frowned upon in the FBI/Infragard handbook and generally everywhere else too.

One of them, Karim Hijazi, used his Infragard password for his personal gmail, and the gmail of
the company he owns. "Unveillance", a whitehat company that specializes in data breaches and botnets,
was compromised because of Karim's incompetence. We stole all of his personal emails and his company
emails. We also briefly took over, among other things, their servers and their botnet control panel."

http://it.slashdot.org/story/11/06/04/1149206/Hacker-Group-LulzSec-Challenges-FBI


Protect yourself. Do not use reuse your passwords (like from your online email account) or use passwords that are found in any common password dictionary. Use common sense.

[muman613]

It is often difficult, especially for people like me, to keep track of so many passwords. I personally use about six computers {3 at work and 3 at home} and it is very difficult for me to think of passwords for each of these systems. For my machines at work we have a policy which requires us to change our passwords every month and we cannot re-use a password we have used in the last few months. It is helpful to use a central authentication server {in our organization we use NIS for authentication} but even so it is hard not to re-use passwords which I have used.

It is helpful to use a random password generator like the following I have found:

http://www.pctools.com/guides/password/

http://www.thebitmill.com/tools/password.html#passwordbuilder