Riverbank Ruminations

Fatal Attraction (1)

As CTO (Chief Technology Officer) for MegaTech, Fred was used to getting tech gadgets in the mail. It was a perk of the position and he loved tech gadgets. Sometimes they were pitiful, sometimes interesting, some were wildly impractical.  Most of the time they were not worth pursuing and for the most part useless. Sometimes they were a subtle or outright bribe for one thing or another. This one was different. It was what appeared to be a well-made helmet for skiing. This was interesting since he was an avid skier and was, in fact, getting ready to go out west for a couple of days of skiing and relaxation. He had just posted online about the upcoming trip. He was careful not to give any specifics as to the destination or time of the trip. Ever cautious, he passed the helmet over to his team to do a quick once over and make sure it wasn’t bugged since they had had some incidents in the past with attempted industrial espionage. They sent it back with a clean bill of health. It was a helmet with a GPS locator and a walkie-talkie, nothing more.

Facebook, Google, loyalty points and Account Take Over (ATO)

Are you in the 25%

• In August of 2018, a company named MediaPRO published a report entitled 2018 State of Privacy and Security Awareness Report. This was their third year doing a study on security awareness across various industries. The study involved 1,024 employees and rated them as either RISK, NOVICE, or HERO based on how well they were able to identify security issues. The sad news from this study was 2018 results were worse than 2017 results. 75% were rated RISK or NOVICE, which meant that these employees were prone to behavior that put their companies at risk. Some other bullet points:
• Finance sector employees performed the worst.
• Management level and above showed riskier behaviors than lower level employees.
• 26% made poor decisions involving social media. ( e.g. sharing details of an unreleased product or other company confidential information)
• 14% could not recognize phishing emails.

Now that 2018 is history, I decided to see what happened last year in the way of data breaches. A lot of press covered ransomware and cryptomining, while breaches faded into the background–like how a really loud noise that doesn’t stop eventually fades from perception.

Security is all about keeping something valuable safe. Identity theft is a big issue these days, but we usually refer to the information that identifies us, as opposed to our actual identity, our physical being.