If you have a phone with caller ID, you have likely been the target of “neighbor spoofing.” 

Neighbor spoofing is not fooling the guy next door. It is a form of caller ID spoofing used by telemarketers, scammers and robocallers to make unsolicited phone calls with an ID number that closely matches your area code and exchange number, which together make up the first six digits of your phone number.

By mimicking as closely as possible the phone number they are calling, spammers can trick more of their targets into answering. 

The most advanced scammers will spoof a number for a brand or company, making it appear that the call is coming from someone in your contact list. 

Last year marked a new high for spoofed calls. The Federal Communications Commission reported in December an average of 375,000 complaints per month, and that is only the number of reports sent in.

The FCC and Federal Trade Commission have begun working together to create a caller ID authentication program to ensure that a call is coming from the number that appears.

So if a call appears to be coming from your neighborhood but you don’t recognize the entire number, don’t pick it up. It could be coming from Russia.

Another Russian front. Despite the massive amount of attention to Russia’s hacking of our election system, there is another Russian attack that could be even more dangerous.

The U.S. accused Russia last week of engineering a series of cyberattacks that targeted American and European nuclear power plants and water and electric systems — and could have sabotaged or shut off power plants at will. Screenshots released by the Department of Homeland Security made clear that Russian state hackers had the foothold they needed to manipulate or shut down power plants, The New York Times said.

At least three separate Russian cyber operations were underway simultaneously.

One focused on stealing documents from the Democratic National Committee and other political groups. Another, by a St. Petersburg “troll farm” known as the Internet Research Agency, used social media to sow discord and division.

A third effort sought to burrow into the infrastructure of American and European nations. That effort is thought to be by the Russian secret service and the military.

Don’t nix it, fix it. A network of repair cafes or remakeries has sprung up internationally, started by people who believe that, when repairing items is actively discouraged by manufacturers, recycling becomes a political act. TechMan previously wrote that a number of states are considering right-to-repair acts, forcing companies to make available parts and repair manuals for their products. Volunteers at the remakeries will repair an item for free to keep it from going to a landfill, The Guardian reported.

Forget the job, sell the application. A one-page job application, which Steve Jobs filled out while at Reed College, sold at auction for more than $174,000, Gizmodo reported. The application did not specify the job being applied for.

Send comments, contributions, corrections and condemnations to pgtechtexts@gmail.com.

First Published: March 20, 2018, 11:00 a.m.