It’s a scary time to be an internet user, with three huges troves of user data recently discovered to be exposed online; opening users up to phishing emails, spam and even credential stuffing attacks.
Gardaí have reported a sharp increase in the number of invoice redirect and CEO fraud-style attacks on Irish businesses in the last few months. “We are getting a couple of cases every week now”, according to Detective Superintendent Pat Lordan, who said that both small and large companies are being hit for amounts ranging from €10,000 into the millions.
In a global sting, named Operation reWired, authorities in the US and around the world have arrested 281 individuals that were involved in a global Business Email Compromise (BEC) scam. The ring had been under investigation for months, during which they were found to have hijacked email accounts belonging to company executives, impersonated staff and ultimately tricked unsuspecting employees into wiring millions in funds into the group’s accounts.
Just a few years ago, if you asked someone how to create a safe password, most people would all say the same thing: Use a mixture of upper- and lower-case letters, symbols and numbers so that it’s too complex for hackers to guess, and you should be safe.
Fast-forward to 2019, however, and you will find more and more people recommending that you use a ‘passphrase’ instead. But what is a passphrase, and why are experts all recommending we use them instead of the traditional password?
There are two main reasons that passwords are becoming outdated – cyber criminals using increasingly sophisticated tools to crack them, and plain old human error when people create them.
Read moreCyber crime has cost mid-size businesses more than €33 million in the UK in 2018, according to a recently-released report by financial services firm Grant Thornton. More than 500 UK businesses were surveyed as part of the study, Cyber Security: the board report.
