What About LinkedIn Scams?

linkedin-logoOn Wednesday we took a look at Facebook scams.  But what about LinkedIn?  Because of LinkedIn’s professional focus, the scams are a little different, but use many of the same tactics.  LinkedIn scams are more likely to draw on information from your professional profile, and tend to be employment or income related.  Here they are:

  • Whaling attacks – What?!  We have talked about phishing and spearphishing, ...
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Beware of Facebook Scams

facebookEverybody, it seems, is on Facebook, and the numbers back it up, with over 1 billion members worldwide.  So naturally, anytime you get a crowd of people this large, the cyber-criminals are going to be all over it.

Don’t even get me started with the oversharing of personal information.  Please stop telling me and the crooks that you will be out of town for a week on a Vegas vacation, and your ...

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BEC – How Cyber-Attackers Can Rip Off Your Company

ic3We warned our readers about the FBI alert regarding the Business Email Compromise scam on July 6.  Cyber-criminals have successfully bilked US companies of over 3 billion dollars since January 2015.  Typically this exploit starts by the attacker gaining knowledge of the CEO’s or other highly placed executive’s user credentials to their email account.  This is most often done using a spearphishing email, but could also be ...

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Spotting a Phish

Phishing HookPhishing is still the overwhelming go-to choice for cyber-criminals launching an attack.  Over 90% of computer system breaches start with a phishing email in an inbox.  Finding ways to unmask these impostors is a good first step are protecting yourself from a phishing exploit.  Let’s look at this first example, apparently from a law firm about a legal action.

 

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DARPA Contest – Machines Fixing Machines?

darpalogoDARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) recently held a contest to explore the feasibility of automating the process of finding vulnerabilities on a group of target computers, and automatically fixing the vulnerabilities.  Using a game format similar to “capture the flag,” on Aug. 5,at the Paris Las Vegas hotel, seven teams of programmers, hackers and researchers set a cybersecurity milestone.

According to Darpa “Our best ...

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Essential Hacking Tools

Kali-logo2Here is a short list of applications that I use frequently when undertaking a penetration test of vulnerability scan.  I don’t use all of these all the time, but they are probably the most popular tools in the security community.  We start with Kali, the Swiss Army knife of exploitation tools.  What can’t Kali do?  Then we look several stand alone tools for host enumeration, port scanning, packet sniffing, vulnerability detection, ...

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Sunday Funnies – Old Tech Lives

8-inch-floppy-diskNot sure how funny this is.  According to Smithsonian.com, the U.S. Department of Defense still uses floppy disks for its Strategic Automated Command and Control System.

The system is still in use because, according to the a Pentagon spokesman, “it works.”  He also was touting the built in “security” in using a technology so old that most modern hackers would not be ...

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NIST Nixes TFA Via SMS

NISTHoly acronyms Batman!  What the heck does this headline mean?  Well, the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) has removed two-factor authentication (TFA) via short-messaging service (SMS) from the approved list of two-factor authentication methods.  The reason is that SMS is an unencrypted service, and the lack of encryption makes it too insecure for use in Federal authentication systems.  NIST is recommending that all ...

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Which Is Better – SMS or App-based TFA?

google-authenticatorI am a firm believer in, and user of two-factor authentication (TFA or 2FA).  Heck, if there was three-factor authentication I would probably sign up.  The two most popular authenticator apps are Authy and Google Authenticator.  I primarily use Google Authenticator wherever I can.  I use SMS when Authenticator isn’t an option, or won’t work.  I had trouble, for instance, getting Facebook to work ...

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