If you feel like robocalls are increasing, you’re right. A recent article in the New York Times reported that 3.4 billion automated calls were placed to landlines and cell phones in April 2018 — an increase of 900 million a month compared with April 2017.
These calls run the gamut of scam attempts, from callers claiming to be with the IRS, customer service for companies like Microsoft, credit card companies, student debt lenders, utility firms, and even foreign governments.
As cybersecurity threats multiply each week, a new version has cropped up — and many are claiming it’s the cleverest yet. This phishing scam works to try and throw a wrench in two-factor authentication, considered by many a necessary extra layer of password security.
Just when you thought the nonstop wave of data breaches had slowed down, a flurry of activity made recent news. In Pennsylvania, a hack of the Department of Education’s website compromised the information of 360,000 teachers and staffers. The city of Atlanta suffered a ransomware attack that took down municipal services and even caused Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport, the world’s busiest, to turn off its Wi-Fi.
Although it wasn’t technically a breach, 50 million Facebook users had their information accessed without consent in the run-up to the 2016 US presidential election.
Last week, the largest DDoS (or distributed denial of service) cyberattack in Internet history struck GitHub, a large web-based hosting service for computer code. At 1.35 terabits per second, unidentified hackers sent the largest flood of traffic ever recorded via an online mechanism called “memcaching” to try and bombard GitHub and bring their web infrastructure down.
Whether you’re paying your own taxes or working as a professional tax preparer this filing season, cybersecurity experts have issued several recent bulletins about hackers working hard to steal sensitive information.
On the tax preparer front, the Internal Revenue Service, state tax agencies, and the tax industry revealed a new round of phishing emails with bad actors posing as potential clients or even the IRS to trick professionals into disclosing sensitive information.
Last week, security experts revealed a nasty new global ransomware attack: Bad Rabbit. But this is no Halloween trick — Bad Rabbit appears to be a variation of the WannaCry and Petya attacks, which infected hundreds of thousands of computers earlier this year and disrupted day-to-day operations for businesses around the globe.
In May 2017, the WannaCry ransomware attack infected more than 230,000 computers in 150 countries, encrypting data, demanding Bitcoin ransom for its return, and disabling computer systems at the United Kingdom’s National Health Service, Spain’s biggest telecommunications provider, Russian banks, and much more.
The prospect of giving a PowerPoint presentation can be downright petrifying. All that energy spent writing concise bullet points, making sure fonts, photos, and formats match up, building transitions between slides, getting the finished package to play properly… That’s all before you have to stand up in front of a crowd and command the room for 15 or 30 minutes with winning conversation and an easygoing attitude.
Last week, Equifax, one of the three largest consumer credit reporting agencies in the United States, reported that a massive data breach exposed the Social Security numbers, driver’s license numbers, and other private information of more than 143 million US residents.
For many of us, September 5th is a day to return to work energized after the Labor Day weekend. The kids are back in school, fall is right around the corner, and we feel confident about our ability to tackle the new week’s obstacles — only to be confronted by an inbox bursting at its seams with unread emails.
