All tagged scam

What Is Smishing And How To Spot This Attack

Smishing is not a new tactic but given that worldwide mobile device traffic is up 222% in the past seven years, it’s no wonder we’re seeing an increase in attacks targeted at mobile devices.

The term, smishing is a portmanteau that combines the term, SMS (text messaging) and the word, phishing (sms + phishing = smishing). As you may have guessed, smishing is phishing that uses SMS and similar types of text messaging.

What Is Smishing?…

Breachstortion

A breachstortion attack consists of a malicious email which claims that the sender has breached the victim’s website or company network, copied data from their databases and moved that data to an offshore server. The email then threatens to post the data publicly unless the victim pays the ransom.

Unlike sextortion, a breachstortion attack does not…

Business Email Compromise (BEC)

In the world of cybersecurity, there are some pretty creative and interesting terms such as, phishing, juice-jacking, rainbow tables, credential stuffing, and botnet. However, there is one type of phishing attack that was given a name without anyone from a marketing team in the room. That is the Business Email Compromise (BEC) . I almost fell asleep while typing that last sentence!

While the name is not very sexy, the attack is simple to execute and can be very costly to the victim. In fact, according to a 2018 FBI report, BEC attacks have earned scammers over 12 billion dollars. BEC is a type of phishing attack with the goal of tricking the victim into sending money…

The Password Conundrum: Part 1

Long Passwords, Short Memories

The password is something we all love to hate. Many of us have to create hundreds of passwords and we are told by the paranoid cybersecurity experts to make them long and use all of the character sets on your keyboard so that they are not easy to guess. This also makes them difficult to remember, so what do most people do? They re-use passwords—which is also a big no-no.

While we all know these general rules, most people don’t know why they exist and what the real risks are. In this blog, I will help you understand the importance of following the rules when developing your list of passwords. 

Three Tips for Creating a Good Password

Below are three tips for creating complex and hard-to-hack passwords. 

  1. Make them long: There is some debate over the best minimum length of a password. Analysis from security expert, Troy Hunt, has shown that many of the sites we use, do not require very long passwords. However, research from Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) shows that the