Whaling Imposter

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.

When the politicians in Colorado legalized cannabis, we all learned about the after effects of Rocky Mountain brownies – but the calories and cannabis burn off after a few hours. What about Russian Forged Cookies? While these “cookies” are tasteless, they have long-lasting after effects that can be costly. What is an HTTP cookie? An […]

What do United Airlines and footballer David Beckham have in common? Disastrous leaked emails. In these recent cases, the leaked emails appear to be legitimate, though Beckham claims some of the leaked emails were “doctored.” But how do we know that leaked email messages discussed in news stories and tabloid columns are actually authentic?

Cyber pirates have found easy prey in real estate brokers, title agents and estate attorneys. Their emails are a treasure trove of information about pending transactions involving large wire transfers. Real estate buyers, eager to close the deal, blindly trust the email they receive and the advisors with whom they correspond.

$100 Million IT Budget May Not Secure “The Human Factor” Morgan Stanley CEO James Gorman has joined a new club along with the CEOs of Goldman Sachs, Barclays and Citigroup. Each has fallen victim to an email prankster who, posing as a colleague or friend, sent email messages to them and tricked them into responding. […]

Imposter Email Lures White House Staff Email Prankster Threatens National Security Why was the newly minted White House communications director, Scaramucci, fired? We don’t know for sure. But an examination of his emails would have shown that he spent the weekend responding to spear phishing emails purported to be sent from Reince Preibus, former White […]

Whaling is Flourishing, A $5 Billion Hacker Lottery Harpooning whales is (in most of the world) a thing of the past. This is good for the kind-hearted. But in the cyber world, harpooning “whales” is a thriving and fantastically profitable criminal profession.

Fake Facebook and Email Wow! What a beautiful vacation that friend of a friend posted in their Facebook account. It looks like the perfect family vacation; all smiles, all sun, some commentary about the perfect spot…

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 […]

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.”