Privacy Tip #313 – Data Breaches Aren’t Going Away Anytime Soon
2021 is behind us. Whether that is positive or negative for you, in my world, it was another record year. A record year of data breaches. According to The Identity Theft...
FBI Warns of Hive Ransomware Following Attack Against Hospital System
On August 25, 2021, the FBI issued a Flash Alert to warn companies, especially in the health care industry, about the proliferation of attacks by threat actors using Hive ransomware. According...
Microsoft Warns of Tricky O365 Phishing Attack
If you are an organization that uses Microsoft Office 365 as your email platform, be on the lookout for a new tricky phishing attack recently used by cyber criminals. Microsoft has...
Law Enforcement Takes Down DoubleVPN
I love seeing another win for law enforcement in the cyber context. Servers and web domains owned by DoubleVPN, a virtual private network, were seized recently following a collaborative law enforcement...
Phishing, Vishing, and Smishing—Your Employees Need to Know the Newest Schemes
New dictionary words have been formed to describe online scams. Phishing, one that everyone knows by now, is when a scammer uses a pretext in an email to get someone to...
Coveware Q1 2021 Report Shows Increase in Ransomware Payments Over Q4 2020
Coveware issued its Q1 2021 Ransomware Report on April 26, 2021, which concludes that “[D]ata exfiltration extortion continues to be prevalent and we have reached an inflection point where the vast...
FBI Warns State and Local Governments of Increased Business Email Compromise Threat
State and local governments have been hammered with business email compromise (BEC) attacks over the past few years and the onslaught does not appear to be abating. Last week, the Federal...
Phishing at the California State Controller’s Office
The California State Controller’s Office (SCO) was recently a victim of phishing. According to its website, an employee of the SCO’s Unclaimed Property Division clicked on a link in an email,...
U.S. Users Targeted with Phishing Scams More than Users in Other Countries
The statistic that cybercriminals have been unleashing 18 million phishing emails laced with malware on a daily basis into cyberspace during the pandemic is mind boggling and one that executives should...
Privacy Tip #269 – COVID-19 Vaccine Scams are Rampant
Those of us who are not health care workers, essential workers or the highest-priority cohort in our state to receive the COVID-19 vaccine are patiently awaiting our turn. We are anxious...