Cybercrime

Espionage or Error? The US military’s new email nemesis is Timbuktu.

Where are most of the US Military’s secrets and not so secrets ending up? Not in one of the cybercriminal hotbed countries, but in the ancient trading post on the trans-Saharan caravan route, the city of Timbuktu.

After reading the recent FBI report on the state of email related cybercrime in 2022, one statistic popped out at me, when correlating different parts of the report related to Business Email Compromise and Ransomware. 

We’ve had a few days of insightful discussions at the world’s largest legal IT security event, ILTA LegalSEC. Since many of you are not able to (or not in the right frame of mind to) travel to beautiful Baltimore to experience this event live, I thought I would dedicate this week’s Tech Essentials to sharing the top three FBI-special-agent speaker insights (from my perspective).

We’ll Make Etymology of Acronym-Originated Tech Speak Interesting… and Useful. Yes, it’s still the year of the tiger – a year of supposed unbound prosperity. But with the stock market plunging, and cybercrime flourishing, I thought it might be nice to forget about tigers and put on another hat, one of an etymologist.

RMail’s AI enhancements are more in line with PRE-Crime™ detection vs. eSecurity risk mitigation. As sophisticated cybercriminal lures become ever more ubiquitous, and the consequence of a hook-and-steal situation more costly and disruptive (think mis-wiring funds and ransomware), we at Tech Essentials are spotting a new trend very much rooted in science fiction.

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 […]

The Art of Prompting – unleashing the power of conversation in the age of AI

"The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing." This quote attributed to Socrates, while controversial, underscores the importance of humility in our quest for knowledge.

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 […]

Falling Prey to a Lookalike Domain scheme can get your entire organization and its clients in major trouble.

Alexander Pope famously wrote, “to err is human, to forgive divine.” It’s usually a nice, refined thing to say to someone when you screw up—the implication is that people make mistakes, and to look past those mistakes is an uncommonly gracious thing to do. 

Summer is all about baseball, but it’s also about cybercriminal lures targeting lawyers, insurance professionals, and any business that accepts credit cards.

With July 4th in the rear-view mirror, we’re now in peak summer season, which means baseball season. (I happen to love baseball and equate it with long summer nights, hot dogs, sprinklers, and days off from school.)