It Was to Be Expected
We knew that any type of newsworthy topic was going to give cybercriminals so much opportunity – and COVID-19 gave them so much bang for the buck. Just because this was something affecting the world in a detrimental way would never be reason enough for hackers to take a break. They were going to take full advantage of the situation regardless of how much worse it could make things for people during their time of need or vulnerability.
Tell Me About Yourself
You can’t help someone effectively if you don’t know the details of their situation. So how can you determine what your clients need if you are not aware of what they are looking to achieve, the problems that they are trying to solve, or their behavioral tendencies when it comes to decision making?
Community Effort
The Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) division announced a final directive this week that requires all individual federal civilian executive branch (FCEB) agencies to “develop and publish a vulnerability disclosure policy (VDP) for their internet-accessible systems and services and maintain processes to support their VDP.”
End User End Game
The conversation around selling your services can get uncomfortable for a variety of reasons. We all have our own beliefs as to how we should be doing it, and few people want to acknowledge that they might be doing it wrong.
Start with marketing. Get your name out there, have a call to action, and a reason for them to respond to you. Simply sending out a postcard with your name on it isn’t enough. Engagement is key, along with giving them a reason to know that they need you!
Impersonation Nation
Business Email Compromise (BEC) is not a new term. BEC scams have been growing in popularity for some time now. If you’re not familiar with BEC, it’s when a fraudulent email is sent to a company or individual, and the email appears to be from a legitimate business resource or person, often varying from the legitimate email address by just a letter or two. There may be instructions within the scam email for the recipient to transfer money, purchase gift cards, click on a malicious link, or perform some other activity at the behest of the sender.
Dark Economy
“This pandemic is great for my business!” said very few people.
Unless you’re a hacker. And then it’s likely that business is booming. We don’t think of cybercriminals as businesspeople. We tend to think they are individuals lurking about in hoodies in their basement. Quite the opposite – or so we have found through investigations and the exposure of organizations that steal our information. These are well organized and structured businesses that thrive – or fail – within their own economies.
Is Punishment Proper?
The emphasis on smart cybersecurity practices is vital. As professionals in the IT industry, we know this, we work to ensure policies and procedures are in place that keep the topic at the forefront of every business we support and work within. But while training employees to learn these behaviors is important, there is one aspect of it that isn’t discussed frequently, or at the very least publicly: The repercussions of making a mistake.
Don’t Forget Me
It is easy to get left behind if you become less interesting. No, we aren’t talking about your friends or your childhood toys, although that does happen. We’re talking about YOU. Yes, don’t leave yourself behind. What? How? Explain!
Remember your MySpace account? Or when your significant other wanted you to create a TikTok account so that you could make fun videos – which happened once, and you realized you would never do THAT again.
Scare Tactics
It should hardly come as a surprise to anyone that cybercriminal activity has surged in 2020. By May of this year, the number of reported attacks had already come close to the total for 2019 according to the federal government.
With the onset of COVID-19, there were a plethora of new opportunities for cybercriminals to take advantage of our uncertainties, fears, and overall lack of knowledge about this virus and how it was spreading.
Before & After
Imagine if you had two emails that were worth a million dollars each. You would do everything that you can to protect those emails and ensure that no one deleted them. You would back them up, have multiple copies in place so that if you lost those emails, you would have a quick way to recover them. You would make sure that access was limited, with strong password protection, and everyone who had access to the delete button was properly trained on how to open and read the emails safely.