$100 Million IT Budget May Not Secure “The Human Factor” Morgan Stanley CEO James Gorman has joined a new club along with the CEOs of Goldman Sachs, Barclays and Citigroup. Each has fallen victim to an email prankster who, posing as a colleague or friend, sent email messages to them and tricked them into responding. Luckily no money or data was stolen. These banks spend millions on cybersecurity yet the weakest link is still the human factor. It’s easy to push [...]
Can we ever know what happened in a meeting behind closed doors, with no recording devices and no third party witnesses? Probably not. Is email a clearer way to communicate a complex message? Not always…. Have you ever been in a situation where an email vanishes? Has your recipient ever claimed not to have received your message, a contract, even your invoice? When an email gets lost without the sender being aware, the entire conversation or negotiation can derail, and t [...]
As consumer awareness of data privacy issues increases, companies that don’t take their clients’ data privacy seriously are getting hit harder and harder. In healthcare, a Florida healthcare provider paid a $5.5 million fine (a HIPAA record) earlier this year for allowing more than 115,000 patient records to be improperly accessed and disclosed. Last year, Ashley Madison paid almost $1.6 million to settle charges related to Federal Trade Commission (FTC) enforcement of data privacy laws, aft [...]
Service professionals and business managers are continually trying to improve workplace productivity, not just to increase profits but also to reduce tedium in their daily work flows. Web applications for customer relationship management (Salesforce.com), professional networking (LinkedIn), messaging, eSigning, and file sharing (RPost), for example, can be extremely helpful tools for streamlining work flows. But what happens when well-intentioned employees bypass their IT depar [...]
While Title IV of The Jobs Act (Reg A+), the amended and expanded securities regulation, changed in mid-2015, organizations have been slow to change their processes until there was a clear understanding of how to use these new funding tools and stay in compliance. The Industry now has comfort with these new financing efficiencies – that now allow accredited and non-accredited investors to fund startup businesses. And, Internet criminals now understand that t [...]
At Frankel Insurance, staff sent an email to bind additional commercial property to an existing policy. Later, a claim was submitted to the insurance carrier, and the carrier denied having a record of the additional property having been added to the policy. Who said what when is often the core of many business disputes. With email notices, it is often not who sent what when, but rather, who sent what, when was it received, and what did it say? In this [...]
Does your news feed closely resemble the plot of a Russian spy novel? It certainly might if you’ve been following the recent drama and mudslinging between the Democrats, the Russian government, the FBI, and the CIA, following the public release of private DNC emails. And that’s before the warnings of an “October Surprise” promised by WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. Assange is threatening to release more confidential emails before the November election. Who needs fiction? [...]
You may have noticed that when you send a large file attachment by email, it sometimes gets kicked back to you undelivered with an error message that says something like: “The attachment size exceeds the allowable limit.” But what are these limits? And how can you securely send a large file attachment when it’s too large to send by standard email? Most email providers enforce file size limitations on email attachments. For example, both Gmail and Yahoo limit file attachme [...]
In the recent Tech Essentials article “Changing Trends in Cyber Security,” we highlighted how hackers are becoming more innovative in their ability to use generally available social media (i.e. LinkedIn recruiter tools) and other business applications to target email recipients with imposter email and lure them into wiring money to hackers. This upfront investment (in social media marketing tools, for example) permits hackers to tailor their message such that it appe [...]
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