The FBI is warning U.S. Olympic athletes who are attending the 2022 Olympics in Beijing, China, to leave their cell phones at home, and instead pick up and bring temporary mobile phones, so-called ‘burner phones’ or disposable phones. The warning, put out last night (January 1, 2022), came from the FBI’s Cyber Division, and was announced as a warning to private industry. While the warning was also geared towards network operators and other industries, the warning specifically, and unusually, speaks directly to individuals as well.

Did you get a message recently across the top of your Gmail account that says “Warning: We believe state-sponsored attackers may be attempting to compromise your account or computer. Protect yourself now”? Worried that someone may have hacked your Google or Gmail account? Read on…

Both the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, and the UK analog are warning users around the world not to use Internet Explorer. The pointed warning to not use IE (any version of Internet Explorer) follows the discovery of “active exploitation of a use-after-free vulnerability in Microsoft Internet Explorer,” and comes from both US CERT (Homeland Security’s Computer Emergency Readiness Team), and the UK’s CERT.

The Facebook security check warning says “Warning: Please Slow Down. It looks like you’re using this feature in a way it wasn’t meant to be used. Please slow down, or you could be blocked from using it.” This is what some people are seeing when they try to send, or reply to, a message within the Facebook messaging feature. The only problem is, people who rarely send messages at all are seeing it.

“The site you are about to visit may harm your computer” warns a by-now familiar refrain from Google. And usually they have their reasons. But over the weekend, Google said that about the entire Internet. Oops.