The Human Touch

Recently, Twitter saw the accounts of some its most famous account holders (Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Barak Obama, Kanye West and more) hacked and used to push out a Bitcoin scam. When all was said and done, the attack generated more than $100,000 in proceeds for the bad guys. The attack was initiated by a 17-year-old from Florida who was able to gain access to Twitter’s systems through social engineering and phishing … an approach which was not technology-based and was not overly-sophisticated.

Now more than ever, bad guys are exploiting people and not technology. Most of the attacks that we see are aimed at getting the user to give up their password as opposed to trying to infect a computer with a virus. With this said, stay safe by always remembering the following:

• Slow down. Do not act hastily. Bad guys want to you feel a sense of urgency and will try to get you to act rashly. Never click links from unknown senders, and review every URL to ensure that it is legitimate. Another safe approach is to try to navigate to the website on your own via a search engine without clicking on the link.

• Be very wary of entering your email password when prompted after clicking a link or opening a emailed document. 99% of the time, this is the result of a phishing attack.

• Be wary of downloading any file. If something is sent to you unsolicited, you should automatically assume it is malicious.

• Do not provide your password to someone that you do not know and/or trust.

And remember … when in doubt, don’t act on it.  It’s simply not worth it.