Lone Wolf vs Community

It's a volatile question in the preparedness community these days; which is the best strategy in developing a preparedness plan for the apocalypse ; going it all lone wolf style or forming a community of trusted friends and family to deal with disruptive events. Most seasoned preppers shun the lone wolf strategy, calling it reckless and unsustainable. Other lone wolf preppers don't say much about it....they're lone wolves after all and want to do their own thing. I'm not so quick to discount the lone wolf strategy and thought I'd lay out some pros and cons regarding both strategies, comparing the merits and advantages of each.

Compare and Contrast

• Raw Selfishness - Winner; Lone Wolf. 
• LW - Picky eaters. Kids or the elderly in the group. People who complain it's too hot or cold while sleeping on the ground, etc... The lone wolf only has to deal with his or her own tolerance for discomfort. They can eat whatever the can muscle through, sleep where ever they can hole up, and run away whenever they wish. 
• Community -  problems, conflicts, and issues all rise within communities. Get more than 2 people together and there will be complaining, arguing, bickering, even violence. A lone wolf doesn't have to tend with any of this. 
• Security - Winner; Community. 
• LW - while it's true a lone wolf can better employ stealth and concealing tactics, there's really no replacement for having someone watch your back while you sleep or standing guard over your person and your gear. The lone wolf does get additional cred for mobility, though.
• Community - however, advantage of a single person's mobility can be overran by more eyes and ears, say, when a community group is rolling
  through an abandoned warehouse and can watch each others' backs. A group of survivors can also take differing sleep schedules, allowing for watches overnight and throughout the day. One big thing to be said here, if you don't trust the members in your community, this advantage is lost to the lone wolf strategy and quickly.

• Search and Scavenging - Winner; Community. 
• LW - only so much ground can be covered by one person. 
• Community - The more eyes and ears involved during a search the more resources that can be found. A community group of four or more would be able to split into groups of two and cover a lot more ground.

• Resource Use - Winner: Lone Wolf. 
• LW - it's true that the Loner may not be able to effectively search as well as a group of scavengers, but what resources are found can be carefully rationed by one individual, for his or her own needs. Food and water, and even medications can be consumed only based on the individual's parameters.
• Community - a group of survivors, it's assumed, would have a central, safe base of operation. Resources found while searching and scavenging can be pooled here and doled out among the survivors as needed. A lone wolf will only usually only be able to carry found resources, or it would be seriously difficult to maintain security of found-resources should the LW cache a hoard somewhere.

• 
  Medical - Winner; Community. 
• LW - There's not much of an advantage a lone wolf would have if they became sick or injured. Their best bet would be to hole up somewhere in hopes of recovery.
• Community - Having more people in a group greatly increases the odds that one of them will have at least rudimentary medical knowledge. If someone in the group gets hurt, too, two people could fashion a make-shift stretcher and haul the wounded back to camp, as another example.

• Morale - Winner; Community. 
• LW - The only advantage a lone wolf has here is threat of lack of cooperation within a community that can occur between different personality types. That threat can lead to internal battles over politics, religion, and more. 
• Community - Even for introverts, being alone all the time is wearing from a psychological perspective. In long term apocalyptic scenario, having people to talk to, laugh with, love, or even argue with can be refreshing and help to keep spirits up.

• Short Term Survivability - Winner; Lone Wolf. 
• LW - When faced with an immediate threat it can be next to impossible to keep a group of people all safe and together while fending off...whatever it is (tornado? Zombies?) Going back to the "Selfish" quality above, the lone wolf only concerns themselves with...themselves. The ability to focus solely on escaping or sheltering just for oneself cannot be underestimated. 
• Community - But....

• Overall Survivability and Sustainability - Winner; Community.
• LW - The lone wolf can live off of luck and the idea of running away to fight another day, but eventually that luck is bound to run out during the apocalypse. 
• Community - ...the resource and knowledge pool that can be acquired by a community of people prepared takes the cake regarding long term survivability. Even in a simple disruptive weather event it's critical for the loner to find friends and family necessary for that long term survival.

The Victor - Community

Prepping within a community, even a small group of 4 or 6, greatly increases the odds of survival and recovery in a disaster event. That-said there are times when going lone wolf, temporarily, may be necessary for immediate survival. Think being in your car on a county road when a tornado knocks you into the ditch, stranded with no help. There are clear cases where a person has only their wits, skill, and immediate resources to survive, but the need for those individuals to reconnect to a group is urgent, especially for the long term.

Of course this list is not 100% comprehensive. There are clear advantages and disadvantages to each, but overall having a community of like-minded people near to you who you can count on when disaster strikes has more pluses than trekking alone.

Peace. 

Online Social Network Security - Staying Safe and Secure with Friends

A few very high-profile ransomware attacks have brought the threat of cyber security to light in recent weeks and considering I work in the cyber security field I thought it may be prudent to address the issue in a post. The risk
became a bit more pressing to me when an elderly family member created a new Facebook account and nearly every privacy setting was set to "Public". He, understandably, was concerned but didn't even know where to go in the app to adjust these settings. Below I'll address some concerns and offer advice and guidance in maintaining a secure and safe online 'footprint' which will dramatically decrease the odds of having your identity stolen through social media.

The Threat

To be clear, anytime you connect to the internet through any device and connect to any web site, you open yourself up to a potential hack or to having your personal information stolen. Creating an online profile within any social media network is another method of exposure of your personal information if you're not careful. Say you create a new Facebook profile and don't review or adjust the privacy settings. You start searching for friends and family, you update your location, add your telephone number, where you graduated high school, where you work and even add your home address. You also include the fact that you're married and have two kids, ages 7 and 10. With Facebook's default settings, anybody who finds your profile has a range of information they can use to steal your identity....or worse. Most passwords are made up of personal information, such as birthdate or graduation data.

Worse than someone brute-force hacking your password now that they have mountains of your personal data mined from your profile, they have your location information now, too. Hardened, non-cyber criminals who come across this data can take additional steps such as breaking into your home when you post your happy vacation plans online. An even worse scenario to consider, and it should always be considered, is you've exposed your kids as well. The information of where you live along with pictures of your kids could reveal the likely school the attend, their friend's homes, or the church where they attend Bible school ... including potential bus or walking routes, all of which could lead to an abduction attempt. 

My example above targets Facebook, but in truth any social media site is the same. Facebook is often targeted and 'picked on' because it's still the most popular with the greatest number of users, but ultimately Facebook is no more or less secure than any other site. Pictures shared from vacations, boasting about the achievements your kids or grandkids accomplished at school or church, even product and local vendor reviews all create an image of you and your life....and the lives of those around you.....which can be exploited by bad guys and gals if you share all of that information to the Public in a wide-open security posture.

How to Protect Yourself

So what can you do? Don't share all of that information to the Public for starters, but how to accomplish this requires a bit more education and the development of some online habits.

Don't be this dog.

Limit Your Exposure

It's tempting to have a profile on every social media network out there, but most Internet junkies use only one or two social networks at most. Think about which network you log onto the most, where your friends are, and where you enjoy sharing the most topics and posts. If you happen to have any other social media profile out there unused, delete them, but even before you delete them, remove any and all information from the profile, then delete it. Why? Even when you delete a profile from a network, the profile remains archived on that social media server, sitting in a "deleted" folder indefinitely. If that social media service gets hacked and the server compromised, your data is still exposed, even if you deleted the profile years ago. Often times data points within the profile, however, are purged completely when they're removed or changed so removing your information before deleting the profile helps protect you a little further. 

Learn the Social Media Settings Thoroughly

Once you've decided on one or two social media networks to join learn the software and settings of those networks completely. Within those settings will be all of the privacy configurations you'll want to get to know and adjust. Normally these settings can be found under your Profile options and may be listed under Privacy or Security. Take the time and peruse each setting and make the following adjustments. 

1. Credentials and signing on (these are critical);
1. Have a solid, hard-to-guess password that's at least 14 characters long and includes special characters.
2. Use multi-factor authentication (MFA), always. MFA is just that, multi-factor, meaning when you sign into the social media network you won't just be prompted for a password, but you'll have to enter a code sent to your phone, too. A hacker with your password shouldn't have your phone, too, so they won't know the code, etc.
3. If your phone supports it, use facial recognition.
2. Remove any and all settings that refer to Public and adjust them to Friends or Those I Follow for instance. 
3. Never include your address or phone number in your profile. Friends and family who 'need' these data points should already have them and keep them stored individually, such as in phone contacts. Social Media should not be used as a personal address book. There's simply too much risk for exposure. A business may be different, however.
4. Be extra careful with work and school information, even previous information in these cases. I never share any details about my job on social media, and I'm intentionally coy about my school as well.

Posting/Tweeting/Sharing

1. While using the social network, be very careful about who you actually share posts to. Many social media networks will have privacy settings per-post so you can limit who sees them.
2. To expand on #3 above; only post information you'd have exposed to the public regardless of the privacy setting you place on the post. Think of it this way; if you're uncomfortable tacking the information on a public billboard in your city's town square, you probably shouldn't be posting it on the Internet regardless of how private you think it'll be.
3. Be careful about what's in that picture you're about to post. A picture contains more than just the subject, usually. Items in the background can expose a lot of private information if you don't review the picture carefully before posting it.

Your so-called Friends

One of the biggest schemes out there involves fake social profiles. Imagine this; you're diligent and lock down all of your privacy settings so only friends can see your semi-personal details, then you receive a friend request from Jacob Jinkleheimer and although Jacob doesn't look familiar to you at all his name sounds familiar so you friend him...only Jacob is a black-hat hacker and now has access to some of your more personal information through your social network profile which he can use to exploit in some fashion. The lure, typically, on social media is to have a lot of friends, to try to be an influencer with high follower numbers. Hackers know this and, thus, slap up fake profiles to tempt you into "liking" them and revealing your data. To avoid this scheme....

1. Thoroughly inspect a potential "friend's" profile before clicking Like. Hackers create hundreds, maybe thousands of profiles across all social media networks, so they don't have a lot of time to put into actually fleshing out those profiles. Accounts that only have a few pictures, no real information, haven't been used in six months or more, or that were just created within the last week, are all keys that indicate the profile is most likely fake.
2. Check the profile's friends and see if you have any friends in common. If not, how'd they find you and why would they want to 'be your friend?" 
3. Watch for hacked accounts from true friends.  We all have those moments of weakness where we click on a link or reveal our password when we shouldn't have. Hackers are in the business of spreading their evil. When they hack an account successfully, one of the first things they do is hit that account's friends list and try to hack others from there, so if you receive an invitation from someone on your legitimate friends list asking you to click a suspicious link or enter your social media password...even though you're already logged on... those are red flags that your friend may have gotten hacked. As the saying goes, "In God we trust. All others we verify."

Note: After working through the privacy and security settings of the social media network you've chosen, it's possible you still may not be comfortable with the level of security the network provides to it's users. If you feel unsafe, change your social media network. There's no harm in doing so. You can let your friends and family know you don't use "XTube-aGram" if they don't secure your information appropriately. Just remember to purge all the information you put on XTube-aGram before actually clicking Delete on that profile.

Final Thoughts

There are a few other steps you can take above and beyond those I listed above, such as purchasing and installing a 3rd party antivirus/anti-malware software suite on all of your devices, using a VPN (virtual private network), and resetting your passwords every 3-6 months. 

In the end being cautious, watchful, and knowledgeable about whichever social media network you choose is the biggest key in preventing exposing your information or getting your account hacked. In this day and age just signing onto the Internet is a serious risk. In regards to the issue of online privacy, just remember, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

Peace.