We Predicted the Death of Ransomware in 2017. Oh, Time Machines. We first wrote about Ransomware attacks in Tech Essentials in 2017 – back when a Bitcoin was valued at $1800 (oh, the good old days). The crux of the article was that many victims were paying their ransom to the cyber perpetrators, but they did not have an easy way to track and reconcile who paid, and m [...]

HBO’s Game of Threats How did a hacker get his hands on the latest script of Game of Thrones (GoT), episode 5, season 7?  It was an email hack plain and simple. The good news? “We do not believe that our e-mail system as a whole has been compromised,” said HBO chairman and CEO Richard Plepler in an internal memo to staff. ( [...]

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 HTTP cookie is a small piece of data sent from a website and stored on your computer, used by websites to remember and record your browsing activity – [...]