Ransomware Attacks Won’t Die--Just Multiply Ransomware has become such a hot topic with a seemingly new case every day that we thought we would pick up where we left off last week... The earliest examples of ransomware (i.e., people hacking into computers, encrypting files and demanding payment in return for decryption) was relatively small potatoes—a hundred dollars here or there in fairly isolated and localized incidents. It used to be your friend’s g [...]

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 [...]

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. Some futurist-types are predicting that homes will one day be able to sense your body temperature and then adjust heat/AC settings accordingly. There could also be increasingly autonomous purchase decisions made by [...]

The Government is Dropping Money Out of Helicopters. FOMO. The Government is Dropping Money from Helicopters. And every American business is trying to catch some of it, any of it, and fast. Surely there won’t be enough to support payroll for every small business in America for 2-3 months. What then? Two trillion dollars sounds like a lot — but much of it is to support big brands and big business. Fear of missing out (FOMO) strikes again. What if these governmen [...]

Today’s New Triple Play (without baseball) Last week everything was as fancy as an iPhone 11. Being on a business conference call with the sounds of a baby happily chirping in the background was distracting. Those good old days (back in February) when anything less than elegance or perfection was disturbing. With today’s California lock down order of all citizens, the fifth largest economy in the world has nearly ground to a halt. Things will change. W [...]

“Juice Jacking” and Safe Charging You’re a good soldier when it comes to keeping your info safe and secure: You encrypt your email (of course using RMail’s simple to use, award winning email encryption). You create a super long and complicated password that not even you can always remember. You take the time to clear y [...]

Not All Email Tracking is Created Equal If you are sending a zillion newsletter or marketing emails, sure, email marketing platforms make it easy to manage your email list; and many do provide some basic tracking information. But how reliable is this information? Should it be relied on important business email or important notifications? No. Why not? First, many of these email marketing platforms base their tracking on whether images in the ema [...]

Today’s Hackers Target Executives with Simple Social Engineering Today’s hackers are more innovative. Rather than just running up charges on your credit card, they are looking to extort money in exchange for return of your private information or to limit their use of it. For insurance executives, private information often includes emails related to customers and their policies. Data could include confidential information about assets, employees, vendor contracts and bank accounts. [...]

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 [...]

(WCry) was successful in infecting over 300,000 computers in 150 countries. It is likely the worst ransomware attack to date. WCry works by locking the files with encryption on each device. Victims are promised a decryption key to unlock their files once they pay a ransom of $300 in Bitcoin. But incredibly, as pervasive as the WannaCry attack has been, it’s creators have only collected about $80,000 in Bitcoin ransom. Less than 0.1% of the victims have paid their $300 ransom [...]