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What’s it gonna take for companies to crack down on their cybersecurity? What’s holding them back? Why do we keep hearing about one company data breach after another?

Well, there’s just not enough IT talent going around. The irony is that most company higher-ups admit that cybersecurity is very important and can even name specific situations that could compromise security, such as

having multiple vendors vs. only a single vendor; not having quality-level encryption in place; allowing employees to

Stop clicking on e-mails about your package delivery! Scam, scam, scam! Look, it’s simple:

• Scammers are also pretending to be from the DHL and FedEx shipping companies, not just UPS.
• Crooks know that at any given time, thousands and thousands of U.S. people are waiting for a package delivery.
• So these cyber thieves send out mass e-mails by the millions, knowing that they will reach a lot of people who are expecting a package.
• The subject line of these e-mails says something about “your delivery” or

Everyone has received very obvious “phishing” e-mails: Messages in your in-box that have outrageous subject lines like “Your Account Will Be Suspended,” or, “You Won!”

While some phishing attacks are obvious, others look harmless, such as those in a person’s workplace in-box, seemingly from their company’s higher-ups.

Researchers point out that an e-mail may appear to come from the company’s HR department, for example. E-mails with an “urgent email password change request” had a 28% click rate, Wo

When it comes to tossing into the rubbish your old computer device, out of sight means out of mind, right? Well yeah, maybe to the user. But let’s tack something onto that well-known mantra: Out of site, out of mind, into criminal’s hands.

Your discarded smartphone, laptop or what-have-you contains a goldmine for thieves—because the device’s memory card and hard drive contain valuable information about you.

Maybe your Social Security number is in there somewhere, along with credit card information

If the person you are sending an e-mail to pretty much instantaneously receives it, how on earth can you unsend or cancel it? Well, you have several options.

Criptext

• This is a browser plug-in that works for Chrome and Safari.
• Your message including attachments will be encrypted.
• You will know when it’s been opened.
• You can recall messages and assign them expiration times. The recall, of course, comes after the recipient has possibly opened the message, but if they’re, for instance, away from their c

A phishing e-mail is sent by a cyberthief to trick its recipient into revealing sensitive information so that the crook could steal money from the recipient or gain access to a business’s classified information. One way to lure an employee is for the crook to make the e-mail appear like it was sent by the company’s CEO. Often, phishing e-mails have urgent subject lines like “Your Chase Bank Balance Is Negative.”

In its 2015 Data Breach Report, Verizon reported that 23 percent of employees open th

You may have been scammed after you responded to an e-mail that appears it came from Apple. When hackers send e-mails that appear to come from a legitimate company like Apple (or Google, Microsoft, PayPal, etc.), with the objective of tricking the recipient into typing in passwords, usernames, credit card information and other sensitive data, this is called phishing.

Many phishing scams are in circulation, including the Apple one. Hackers know that tons of people have Apple accounts. So if they r

You have the best IT security, but dang it…the bad guys keep getting in. This means someone inside your house keeps opening the back door and letting the thieves slip inside. You have to find out who this enabler in your company is, and it may be more than one.

They don’t know they’re letting in the crooks, because the crooks are disguising themselves as someone from your company or a vendor or some other reputable entity.

After figuring out who these welcome-mat throwers are, you then have to con

You’re sitting on your front porch. You see a stranger walking towards your property. You have no idea whom he is. But he’s nicely dressed. He asks to come inside your house and look through your bank account records, view your checkbook routing number and account number, and jot down the 16-digit numbers of your credit cards. Hey, he also wants to write down all your passwords.

You say, “Sure! Come on in!”

Is this something you’d be crazy enough to do? Of course not!

But it’s possible that you’ve

Let’s look at the top 10 scams (random order).

Charity

• A fraudster claims to represent a charitable organization.
• Such scams can operate ring-style, such as one out in Colorado some years ago in which women wearing crisp white dresses that resembled the dresses nurses used to wear, and also wearing white caps (like a nurse), solicited motorists for money by walking around at stoplights holding out tin cans that had a label on them like “Help Fight Drugs.” Many people were fooled by the white outfit

So someone comes up to you in a restaurant—a complete stranger—and asks to look at your driver’s license. What do you do? Show it to that person? You’d have to be one loony tune to do that.

However, this same blindness to security occurs all the time when a person is tricked by a “phishing” e-mail into typing in the password and username for their bank, or it may be the login credentials for their PayPal account or health plan carrier.

Phishing e-mails are a favorite scam of cyber criminals. THEY

You’d think that it would be as easy as pie to avoid getting reeled in by a phishing scam. After all, all you need to do is avoid clicking on a link inside an email or text message. How easy is that?

A phishing scam is a message sent by a cybercriminal to get you to click on a link or open an attachment. Clicking on the link or attachment downloads a virus, or takes you to a malicious website (that often looks like real site).

You are then tricked into entering user names, passwords and other sens

Intel Security has compiled a list of the top ways cybercriminals play with the minds of their targeted victims. And the chief way that the cybercriminals do this is via phishing scams—that are designed to take your money.

The fact that two-thirds of all the emails out there on this planet are phishy tells me that there’s a heck of a lot of people out there who are easily duped into giving over their money. I’m riled because many of these emails (we all get them) scream “SCAM!” because their subj

Ever felt like your computer was possessed? Or that you aren’t the only one using your tablet? I think I smell a rat. Literally, a RAT.

A RAT or remote administration tool, is software that gives a person full control a tech device, remotely. The RAT gives the user access to your system, just as if they had physical access to your device. With this access, the person can access your files, use your camera, and even turn on/off your device.

RATs can be used legitimately. For example, when you have

A recent study says that people are more mindful of online safety issues than what experts had previously believed. An article on phys.org says that Nitesh Saxena, PhD, wanted to know what goes on in users’ brains when they come upon malicious websites or malware warnings.

Saxena points out that past studies indicated that users’ minds are pretty much blank when it comes to malware signs. Saxena and colleagues used brain imaging (functional MRI) for their study.

Study subjects were asked to tell t