Don’t Be Like 7sdf8dxz0sjh-3. Get RMail. Did you hear the one about the guy who couldn’t remember his “unhackable” Gmail password, so he changed his name to 7sdf8dxz0sjh-3? Now that you’ve stopped laughing uncontrollably, we can talk about something slightly more sobering: A new ransomware attack will occur every 11 seconds this year according to Cybersecurity Ventures. The estimated total cost of these attacks? $20 billion. “Back” in 2018, 39% of ransomware victims capit [...]

Your Smart Home May Need to Go Back to School We’ve been living in/with smart homes for many years now. You can use Alexa or Google Home to dim lights, play music throughout your house and reorder milk when the time comes. And this is just the beginning. Some futurist-types are predicting that homes will one day be able to sense your body temperature and then adjust heat/AC settings accordingly. There could also be increasingly autonomous purchase decisions made by [...]

Signs of the Times: Dealing with Lower Home Bandwidth and a Host of Other New Security Threats As 2020 plods along, new tech challenges I never thought we’d face are becoming realities. First of all, as I’m sure many of you who share living spaces have noticed, home internet connections have become less than ideal during the 8AM – 12 noon timeframe. My kids’ virtual learning via video hogs so much bandwidth that my own video calls for business are cutting out (fortunately, virt [...]

Email impostor trickiness lures HR staff to change ADP payroll direct deposits In these strange economic times, impostors have identified an overworked company department. With Human Resource (HR) departments handling a new onslaught of employee concerns and issues, staffing changes, and remote work policies, email imposters have inserted themselves stealthily into their world. And, they have struck gold! CAUTION: This is complex trickery that usually results in $ [...]

“You’re Fired!” Fake Termination Emails Proliferate in this Climate of Job Insecurity It was only a matter of time. Fresh off their latest exploits at trying to phish for sensitive financial account information, scammers have set their sights on people’s actual jobs. With jobless claims now topping 30 million and the unemployment rate headed for new highs, cyber criminals now have fertile ground for a brazen new scam. It goes like this: You receive an email wi [...]

Right Email, Wrong Recipient. No Problem. Recall The company travel agent, Leah, sometimes gets some really insightful inside information about her client company – sent to her accidentally. Fortunately, she is a trusted outside contractor and politely replies to her client, “I think you did not intend to send this to me.” Oops? All of that sensitive business information intended to go to Leah in accounting, instead went to the outside travel agent [...]

Whale Eats Shark. Whale Eats Nurse. Whale Eats $1.2mm Killer whales occasionally hunt sharks. When they do, it can be ugly. In a recent whaling attack (This is not a nature article. We are referring to the very tricky type of email “spear-phishing” impostor email attack), the poser sent an email to one of the most famous sharks (from the Shark Tank TV show); an email with an invoice for a real estate renovation. There was no hack of an email account. There were no s [...]

Whaling Redux: Insurers Don’t Cover Whale Attacks Given the popularity of our piece on whaling last week, we thought we’d follow this up by looking back on a piece we ran in the early days of whaling about a fake CEO email that cost a company nearly half a million dollars (Tech Essentials recommen [...]

Whaling Can Be a Grusome Affair It’s an election year, so it should come as no surprise that Russian military hackers are ramping up their efforts to wreak havoc on US elections. The NY Times reported on Jan 15 that hackers from a shadowy intelligence unit called GRU have been trying to gain access to Burisma, the Ukrainian gas company at the heart of the current impeachment trial. While it is not yet clear what the hackers found, it is likely they were trying to dig up potentially [...]

The FBI Wants You to Stop Inadvertently Giving Criminals Money The FBI Elegantly Asks You to Stop Sending Money to Internet Criminals. We are now in the 16th annual National Cybersecurity Awareness Month, a collaborative effort by the US Government and participating industry groups to educate all computer users enough so that they stop clicking those pesky links that download viruses and stop sending personal, health, employment, and tax information unencrypted. [...]