The DDoS attack on X.com this week provided a certain amount of schadenfreude for people less than enamored by Elon Musk. It also rang alarm bells in the cybersecurity community.
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Dealing with wonky printers is a universal frustration. According to Gartner studies, printers are by far the biggest technology problem, racking up 50 percent of all technical support calls worldwide. And that makes them a very profitable scam.
Here’s how it works. You’re sitting at home and want to print out a bill, letter, or other document and the printer hangs up. The little wheel is just spinning and spinning. After multiple tries you decide to call tech support to fix the problem. After 2 hours of sitting listening to the same song, interrupted by the recorded voice telling you your “call is important,” you start surfing for some sort of help. Your results show three or four sites for printer support and a free chat service.
You click one of them, still waiting on your phone for help, and immediately get someone in the chatbot who is very helpful and asks if they can be connected to your computer to see what the problem is. In the hope of being freed from frustration you click on a link and suddenly your “savior” is moving around your computer downloading “the latest printer driver.” It is only much later that you find he has found your banking information and has sucked your account dry.
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Phishing attacks are on the rise again with the help of sophisticated generative-AI tools. However, new defenses and increased wariness among potential victims are blunting phishing’s potential for widespread harm.
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The EU's Digital Operational Resiliency Act (DORA) went live in January. This legislation's goals seem to conflict with the US administration’s willingness to ignore technology security standards. The question is: Who will stand up to protect corporate and consumer data?
DORA is highly targeted at the stability and resilience of the financial services sector. It ensures financial institutions can respond to, withstand, and recover from ICT-related threats and disruptions. It also requires robust strategies and policies to manage ICT risks in financial institutions.
Arnaud Treps, chief information security officer at Odaseva, said, “DORA is very different from previous regulation where you have to change where you operate. DORA is about having proper backups, the capability to restore quickly, and building redundancy.”
Europe takes the lead
But does the US rejecting data privacy regulation mean walling America off from the rest of the world? Meta has threatened to potentially limit
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An independent threat intelligence team warned the Treasury Department that representatives of Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency was a significant “insider threat.” The warning made the problem of insider threats a new worry for US citizens, sparking multiple discussions on social media. It also made a new case for technology that defended against the threat.
Insider threats are not the most common form of security weakness, but they are the hardest to defend against. Even if a company successfully screens out potential bad actors in the hiring process, they have to make sure who they hired is who shows up to get their security badge. And if they get past those two processes, there’s always the possibility of an unbalanced or angry employee bringing a firearm into the office to commit mayhem. Luckily there are technologies in place, such as advanced detection and response, identification validation, and AI-driven weapons detection available in the market.
Identifying the threat
According to the Verizon Data Breach Investigation report for 2024, 80 percent of breaches are based on social engineering and phishing making them the top attack vectors. However, the report said that 32 percent of breaches involving an insider are considered malicious. That is a cause for significant concern when hiring new workers. Identifying a potential threat is easier than repairing the damage it causes later.
Quantum computing could potentially break current encryption methods, leading to a surge in research into quantum-safe cryptography, but will theymore
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There has been a lot of debate regarding the imposition of moderation on social media and whether that constitutes censorship and violations of the right to free speech. That argument is specious at best. Offending content on commercial social media is removed only when it negates profitability.
Most humans moderate their speech. Sometimes we think about impulsively speaking in reaction to something that incites strong emotions. People who do not react have what is called, “self-control”. Some people don’t have that filter (I’m looking at you, Elon) and blurt out offensive, nonfactual, or dishonest responses. Sometimes they aren’t atypical, they are just selfish people without manners (still looking at you Elon). Moderation of your speech is just a civilized attitude.
Profit motive
When it comes to social media, however, especially for-profit social media, the primary factor is profit. That has been the guiding principle of all social media moderation.
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There is no question that the cybersecurity industry performs a vital role in keeping the digital world safe. It’s too bad the industry is so dedicated to bland, repetitive and un-informational marketing and research.
The problem doesn’t exist with cybersecurity alone. Every tech industry under finances and plagiarizes marketing communications both within and without their niches, but the problem in security is that there is so little actual data to refer to, it is easy to make it up and still be believed. The introduction of AI into marketing efforts definitely cuts down the price and effort of communications, but it makes the bland and repetitive content even more bland, repetitive while making it less informative than when humans are actually involved.
Anyone involved in the process of evaluating this content and mining nuggets of relevant truth knows the problem and some are trying to do something about it. James Bore is one of them.
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Mark Zuckerberg made two announcements about major changes in Meta in the past two weeks. The first was the revelation that they would be creating hundreds of AI-driven bots to interact with users. The second was the announcement that they would stop moderation of content, “except for dangerous stuff,” according to a video posted by Zuckerberg. With a certain amount of schadenfreude, we note that Meta had to pull the accounts they had already made as users started engaging with them, finding their inherent flaws and raking them over the coals for how piss-poor their execution was.
Both of these announcements validated a decision I had made earlier this year to start divesting myself of Meta platform accounts. I made the request to deactivate all the accounts (Facebook, Instagram and Messenger) a week before both announcements. I would have done it sooner if I had known it would take Meta 30 days from my request to deactivate everything. This morning, however, I received a text from my partners in Cyber Protection Magazine asking if I thought we should deactivate our Facebook account.
Frankly, I had forgotten we had one, basically because we received zero engagement from the platform, despite the amount of content we put up there. That,.too, is a result of Meta de-emphasizing legacy media. Of course, I concurred with the team. Sometime in February, we will disappear from Facebook.
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We open a new year and a new season with our friend, Ian Thornton-Trump, chief information security officer at the MSSP Inversion6 and in 30 minutes we take on some pretty meaty subjects.
First, we discuss how China strategically infiltrated technology systems in the US and other countries as a geopolitical message rather than attacks. He discusses the challenges of securing complex, interconnected systems and the need for proactive defense.
Next we review the rise of corporate power and influence and how the increasing wealth and influence of individuals like Elon Musk is disrupting the traditional balance of power in democracies. The ethical concerns around wealthy individuals wielding disproportionate political influence could result in something the oligarchs are not expecting.
Finally, we review potential trade wars and the possibility of Canada and Mexico joining the BRICS alliance.
2025 is going to be bumpy but very interesting.
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