Encryption Security

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. Who is doing the whaling? Sophisticated hackers start by purchasing your information from marketing companies and LinkedIn recruiter tools. They use basic automation tools to lure “whales [...]

Is “Security by Obscurity” An Obsolete Concept? The term “security by obscurity” has been around for a long time. Traditionally, this has referred to the idea that the best way to keep a system safe is to keep its design (and any potential vulnerabilities) a secret. To many, “security by obscurity” has also represented the idea that there is safety in numbers, such as on a social media network that has hundreds of millions of users. One might argue that the intersection of [...]

Ingram Micro Australia has added RPost email security services to its cloud marketplace, considering the heightened interest in email security and compliance that has fueled demand for RPost. Ingram Micro is the world’s largest technology distributor. “Customers in regulated industries, as well as businesses large and small, have relied on RPost technologies for more than a decade, for the highest levels of security and compliance with the simplest user experience,” state [...]

They Know Everything About You You may already know Uber drivers now score YOU, the passenger, and that a customer rating indicates who they choose to pick up. But did you realize a score below 4 out of 5 could potentially drive up your costs (fewer drivers want to drive you, triggering premature “congestion” pricing)? Best Buy (and others) have shifted away from a “customer is always right” policy, now using your shopping and product return data to ban select [...]

James Bond Enters Cyber Security Enter 2018. A new generation of cyber security risks bear names that make it sound like they were implanted by James Bond villains (“Spectre”), with worldwide doomsday impact (“Meltdown”), coupled with anti-virus programs used for international espionage (Kapersky Labs allegations). In short, “Meltdown” basically melts security boundaries which are normally enforced by computer hardware. “Spectre” is based on the root, [...]

Foreign Journalists Discover Treasure in Bermuda As enchanting as the Bermuda sea is, during rough weather, Bermuda’s beguiling reefs have been the source of many lost ships over the past hundreds of years during trans-Atlantic journeys shipping treasures and taxes from the Americas to Europe. However, no one could have anticipated the rough waves that just crashed upon some of the world’s richest and most well-known companies as the true hidden treasure in Bermuda had long been a [...]

Should You Trust Your Fax? Habits are often hard to break. Some professional offices, particularly in the health care sector, when there is a need to send something private, send by fax. Their belief is, if they send by fax, the transmission is secure and private (HIPAA compliant). While they may have maintained this way of communicating out of habit or by policy, the environment in which they are communicating has changed. No longer, at the receiving end, are people [...]

Wilmer Hale (Accidentally) Sends WSJ Client Strategy A staffer at Wilmer Hale, one of the world’s largest and most prestigious law firms, sent client confidential SEC-Whistleblower strategies of PepsiCo, their client, to the Wall Street Journal by accident. How could this happen? Human error, they claim. In this situation, the staffer was sending the internal client secret memo to other staffers and accidentally added a person at the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) as one [...]

Panama Papers – A Second Look at Human Error The most consequential type of data leak may be the often openly colorful private correspondence between lawyer and client. This correspondence, if exposed, may be revealing as it contains attorney-client advice, dialog regarding strategies, financial, and legal consideration, as well as documents. Lawyers are afforded a special protection for this sensitive client communications – attorney-client privilege. Attorney– [...]

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 House chief of staff. Politicians in Washington struggle to create their own identities and mai [...]