Technology
Events for
Minneapolis
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How to Identify a Spear Phishing Email
Pause. Think. Act.
More than 90% of cyberattacks begin with a spear phishing email. Spear phishing emails aren’t just a generic piece of spam, they’re emails from your boss with your company signature or from your credit card company warning you of some recent activity on your account. Spear phishing attacks are getting more sophisticated and are becoming harder and harder to detect. In this week’s Pause. Think. Act. video, Chief Technology Officer…
Why the White House email spoofing prank scared me, and why it should scare you too
On August 1st, a report was issued that detailed email exchanges between senior-level White House officials and a prankster out of England. It was a simple spoof email in which the officials were duped into communicating openly with someone that was not who they said they were. The officials that were recently tricked included former White House Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci, Ambassador to Russia Jon Huntsman, and Eric Trump. They were quick to…
Social Engineering: What to Look For and How to Protect Yourself
Pause. Think. Act.
In this week’s Pause. Think. Act. installment, we’ll discuss the broader topic of social engineering. Social engineering is one the most effective types of cyber attacks. No matter how much money you spend on security tools and resources to defend against the bad guys, social engineering can circumvent most of these efforts. In these types of attacks, cyber criminals leverage and manipulate human behavior, and there’s not much security tools…
What does a good password look like?
Pause. Think. Act.
Most people know not to use the password “Password1” to protect their private information at work or online. But, there is a bit more to the story than that. Yes, you want to avoid using very common passwords and simple dictionary words. But, even certain character substitutions have been shown to be ineffective, e.g. “P@ssw0rd1” is no more secure than its “simple character” counterpart. Most brute force attacks and password…
Four Keys in Leadership
As President of SUCCESS, I have the pleasure of spending time with each new employee shortly after they start with the company. On several occasions, I’ve been asked, “what’s your role here?” The easy and short answer is that I’m responsible for “day-to-day operations.” That’s a fairly “stock” answer and applies to the President/Chief Operating Officer at any company.
But that answer isn’t meaningful to most people. Regardless of “level,” what best describes a…
Multi-Factor Authentication 101
Pause. Think. Act.
Last week, Alex talked about password length, complexity, not reusing passwords, etc. Assuming you followed Alex’s advice, you now have a proper password that is complex and unique for each application, webpage, device, network, etc.
This week we will take identity management a step further by introducing the concept of Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) or 2 Factor Authentication (2FA). Multi-Factor Authentication is simply using a combination of something you know,…
The Lowdown on Password Managers
Pause. Think. Act.
If you’ve been following along with our Pause. Think. Act. campaign, you have reduced your attack footprint and are less susceptible to a brute force attack. This is because you are using unique and complex passwords for all applications and websites. Even if one of your accounts is compromised, you have enabled multi-factor authentication so the attackers are unable to pass the second phase of the authentication process. The downside…