Cybercrime

The Art of Prompting – unleashing the power of conversation in the age of AI

"The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing." This quote attributed to Socrates, while controversial, underscores the importance of humility in our quest for knowledge.

Espionage or Error? The US military’s new email nemesis is Timbuktu.

Where are most of the US Military’s secrets and not so secrets ending up? Not in one of the cybercriminal hotbed countries, but in the ancient trading post on the trans-Saharan caravan route, the city of Timbuktu.

Falling Prey to a Lookalike Domain scheme can get your entire organization and its clients in major trouble.

Alexander Pope famously wrote, “to err is human, to forgive divine.” It’s usually a nice, refined thing to say to someone when you screw up—the implication is that people make mistakes, and to look past those mistakes is an uncommonly gracious thing to do. 

Summer is all about baseball, but it’s also about cybercriminal lures targeting lawyers, insurance professionals, and any business that accepts credit cards.

With July 4th in the rear-view mirror, we’re now in peak summer season, which means baseball season. (I happen to love baseball and equate it with long summer nights, hot dogs, sprinklers, and days off from school.)

A blissful way to counter payment paranoia.

Now there’s another common syndrome in the working world that I’d like to shed a light on: “Payment Paranoia”.

It’s summer now, and you’re going to be headed on a nice vacation soon. You’re putting together all your to-do lists so you can truly escape from the office without anyone bothering you. About a week out from your big trip, you ask your colleague, Jerry, to cover for you on some key accounts. Jerry, being the mensch that he is, agrees. After crafting that clever out-of-office reply, you’re now ready to send over your login credentials to Jerry who happens to work remotely in Tashkent. 

After reading the recent FBI report on the state of email related cybercrime in 2022, one statistic popped out at me, when correlating different parts of the report related to Business Email Compromise and Ransomware. 

We’ve had a few days of insightful discussions at the world’s largest legal IT security event, ILTA LegalSEC. Since many of you are not able to (or not in the right frame of mind to) travel to beautiful Baltimore to experience this event live, I thought I would dedicate this week’s Tech Essentials to sharing the top three FBI-special-agent speaker insights (from my perspective).

A quick program note for our regular readers: we’re interrupting our scheduled series on the best-in-class, scalable eSignature software that is RSign so that we can address some important current economic events…

You may wish you were one of the zombies from The Last of Us after a BEC attack. Previously on Tech Essentials, we introduced you to the cybercrime phenomenon initiated by Email Eavesdropping and ending in a mis-wire, in part 1 of a 3-part series we’re running.