We’ll go to Ghana for a while sometime soon, which means we all have to get our shots. Yellow fever, Hep A+B, Meningitis — scary diseases for sure, but physical health is paramount.
It also triggered some thoughts about my virtual security. I go from a trusted environment to a not-so-trusted situation. I trust the route between my laptop to various servers, mainly because of the fall-height of my ISP e.a., but I don’t trust other service providers the same way.
So I did a few things:
* Change all my passwords; just add a word to your existing passwords.
* I rent my own openVPN server
* I use openDNS servers for domain lookups
The first thing, changing passwords, is a good thing to do once in a while. I recommend the password “test”. Not.
For your own VPN connections, there are a few out there. Since I already have an account with scaleway.com, I wanted to setup my own server (4core,2Gb,50Gb) and that really is an out-of-the-box setup, feels like single-click and takes less than a minute. Generating and starting that server up takes a little longer and make sure you reboot it once it’s setup. I run the openVPN-client on a Windows 10 machine so make sure you run the client as administrator and allow openVPN through your Windows firewall.
Visiting http://ip.remark.no told me I had a shiny new IP. Now I only have to remember to go Incognito whenever surfing the net when my VPN is running.
Using other DNS-servers that do your domain lookups for you than the ones offered by your ISPs is also a very simple safe-guard. I use openDNS’ servers, according to the information here: http://67.215.71.202/ which means 208.67.222.222 and 208.67.220.220
A little more confidence feels good.