Hackers

Your Smart Home May Need to Go Back to School We’ve been living in/with smart homes for many years now. You can use Alexa or Google Home to dim lights, play music throughout your house and reorder milk when the time comes. And this is just the beginning.

Email security has been a hot topic as of late, with last week’s news of a supposed breach of 272 million email usernames and passwords and recent statements made by a hacker who claims to have accessed Hillary Clinton’s private email server two years before the private server’s existence was first reported by the New York Times. In the […]

In the recent Tech Essentials article “Changing Trends in Cyber Security,” we highlighted how hackers are becoming more innovative in their ability to use generally available social media (i.e. LinkedIn recruiter tools) and other business applications to target email recipients with imposter email and lure them into wiring money to hackers.

…and does it change the result? Who is responsible for the recent Democratic National Committee (“DNC”) hack and resulting emails published on WikiLeaks? Russian hackers are suspected and the FBI is investigating, but Russia adamantly denies involvement. The hackers could be from the same group who stole DNC’s oppositional research about Republican Presidential nominee Donald Trump in […]

A hacking group called Shadow Brokers has reportedly stolen powerful hacking tools from the Equation Group, a hacking group believed to be NSA-backed and responsible for many of the largest state-level hacks in history. On Saturday, Shadow Brokers released a subset of these tools to the public, which several former employees of the NSA’s hacking division, known as […]

Next week marks the last official week of summer vacation. It is likely also the beginning of your “back to work” business travel. Business travellers should note these specific precautions when conducting business transactions from the road, especially if you are likely to be more focused on the speed of getting things done rather than […]

Not All Email Tracking is Created Equal If you are sending a zillion newsletter or marketing emails, sure, email marketing platforms make it easy to manage your email list; and many do provide some basic tracking information.

Earlier this year, Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, unintentionally revealed (in a photo he posted to his Facebook account) that he covers up the webcam and audio port on his laptop. He literally has a small piece of masking tape over the pea-sized camera lens and another one on the audio port where headphones plug in. […]

What do United Airlines and footballer David Beckham have in common? Disastrous leaked emails. In these recent cases, the leaked emails appear to be legitimate, though Beckham claims some of the leaked emails were “doctored.” But how do we know that leaked email messages discussed in news stories and tabloid columns are actually authentic?

(WCry) was successful in infecting over 300,000 computers in 150 countries. It is likely the worst ransomware attack to date. WCry works by locking the files with encryption on each device. Victims are promised a decryption key to unlock their files once they pay a ransom of $300 in Bitcoin.