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When Every Day is PII Day
It's not the same as Pi Day, I get it. That happens once a year. When you're a hacker, though, EVERY day could be PII day. And that is NOT a good thing. Personally identifiable information (PII) is any data that can be used to identify a specific individual. Along...
The Social Side of Cybercrime
You've probably seen it on a TV show or in a movie. A couple of people, typically dressed in khakis and polos, carry some sort of computer equipment into an office and convince the receptionist that they've been called in to install something or fix something. A new...
Survey Scams – The Art of Hacking
Wouldn’t you like to receive gifts and discounts all the time? We all would! The reality is that our human love of gifts and discounts and deals is something cybercriminals find easy to exploit. Our human curiosity is another. Bad actors have been exploiting both for...
Business Email Compromise in the Real World
Yes, another "jargon" word - BEC, or Business Email Compromise, is a cyberattack where bad actors (hackers) pretend to be legitimate people with legitimate business email addresses - YOUR business email address, perhaps. The bad guys could be sending real emails from...
The Dark Web – Illicit Shopping Mall of Badness
The dark web brings to mind images of malicious agents sneaking around online in search of illegal drugs, personal information, and the newest ransomware software - and those images are all, unfortunately, correct. It's a scary place where all manner of things can be...
Verizon: Ransomware Increased 13% in 2021
Sobering - and scary - to realize that the rise in ransomware attacks in 2021 is as big as the prior five years COMBINED. Wow. The annual Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report 2008 - 2022 was finally released, and with it, we get a view of ransomware from the data...
The True Cost of Ransomware is More Than the Ransom
Have you heard the joke about the cybercriminals who escaped the scene of the crime? They ransomware. It’s a topic that has dominated headlines with high-profile attacks demonstrating how cybercrime has evolved in recent years. Ransomware attacks encrypt the...
Protect Yourself from Email Fraud
Email fraud keeps getting worse. More prevalent, more insidious. More sneaky. The FBI's Internet Crime Center (IC3) logged a whopping 241,206 complaints in the four-and-a-half-year period ending December 2021, with losses totaling $43 billion, according to a new FBI...
Is Your Password As Strong As You Think It Is?
When I first saw this graphic, I thought to myself, "This will open some eyes," and, simultaneously, "This might be the scariest news about passwords that I have ever seen." True story. I've been recommending strong passwords to our clients, my friends, random people...