Hey Friends,

This week is Cyber Scotland Week; a week-long series of events aimed at making Scotland cyber aware and resilient. Today, during an event about Digital Footprints I got into an interesting conversation with a lady about how the information we upload or post to the Internet is stored and archived.

Like most people, she believed that when we delete a post from Facebook or a comment on a web forum it is gone forever. However, needless to say, she was shocked to learn that this is not actually the case, and that deleted content is often archived and still accessible to anyone with the right tools or knowledge.

I obviously do not have access to any GHCQ or Google data vaults, but I was able to introduce her to the Wayback Machine. An Internet archive service that allows people to visit archived versions of Web sites. Visitors to the Wayback Machine can type in a URL, select a date range, and then begin surfing on an archived version of the Web.

Now it can be fun to revisit an older version of your favourite website or look back at old news articles predicting a Y2K apocalypse in 1999. However, it can also be slightly worrying for some to look back at old content which they thought had been deleted forever but is in actual fact still available publicly on services such as these.

So my challenge this week is to visit the Wayback Machine and hunt down any old footprints you thought were long deleted. You may also want to revisit my previous post on using Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) to hunt down old usernames and accounts.

For now, have a great week.

Take care,

Chris

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Things I've found interesting this week

This week I am sharing some interesting FREE events taking place during Cyber Scotland Week:

\\ One Event: Think Like a Hacker: Learn How to Use Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) to Defend Your Organisation

\\ Two Event: Avoiding scammers and schemers - keeping users safe online.

\\ Three Event: In the eye of the storm... inside Cambridge Analytica from an incident management perspective

Favourite Quote

Privacy is not option, and it is shouldn't be the price we pay just for getting on the Internet - Gary Kovacs

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