Keeping you up to date on the latest in tech and cyber. Feel free to forward to interested colleagues and acquaintances.
This week we have news on some worrying developments in cyber attacks with AI, a major breach story, and some good news for collaborative file editing.
Deep Phishing
Cyber criminals are taking advantage of AI to generate deeply personalized and complex attacks, known as Deep Fakes. Like the Wolf dawning Grandma’s garbs to fool Little Red Riding Hood, scam artists can impersonate trusted parties like never before to bring down our guards. By formulating attacks via AI with information that would seemingly be too uniquely accurate to be a scam, people are more susceptible to becoming victims of fraud than ever before.
Bloomberg reports that Banks are expecting Cyber Crime to cost $8 trillion this year, and on track for $10.5 Trillion in 2025. With the ability to create innumerable individualized attacks, the protectors of Cyber Security are having to ramp up efforts to avoid losing the battle against criminals. It will take a culture of Cyber awareness and increased education to put up a fight.
Many organizations are reporting very specific attack vectors that are so skillfully crafted to impersonate their usual vendors and clients, that they are worried at the increased possibility of personnel taking the bait. AI can generate all types of sophisticated impersonations from voice clones, visuals, and language patterns, pushing the limits of what the rational mind can differentiate between real and fake.
Learn how you can combat the coming cyber struggles with SecureWorks and our new advanced email protection service.
MOVE it on Down the Road
The Cyber Security landscape mounts up as larger, more critical, infrastructure is increasingly targeted.
The MOVEit file service ransomware attack had the Oregon Department of Transportation (ODOT) lost without direction. Anyone with a state issued ID or Drivers License had their information compromised, including details like name, address, and social security number. The massive scope of the data breach, affecting over 3.5 million people, left ODOT in shock and they did not make any acknowledgment of the attack for months. Claiming they didn’t want to release any statements until after a forensic investigation, which took several months to complete following the breach.
Once ODOT finally publicly addressed the hack, surprised Oregonians expressed their fears of widespread identity theft and were disgruntled at being unaware for months that their personal information was caught in the dark web. Furthermore, ODOT was just one entity that was affected by the worldwide ransomware attack on MOVEit.
Government services are clearly in hacker’s sights, and data from the UK Govt. shows that the larger your organization is, the more likely you are to be targeted. Do you know anyone lacking secure file services? Have them contact JustWorks today and we can deploy secure file systems for their IT.
Easy Co-Editing
Egnyte recently released an integration with Microsoft Office 365, allowing you to Co-Edit files simultaneously with other colleagues. Have a PowerPoint or Excel document that you and your team are completing? Well, now you no longer have to worry about who works on the file, or when. Co-Edit allows everyone to access the same file, at the same time, so that projects can progress with real time collaboration ensuring all edits are captured in one file. This means no one is stuck waiting for their turn, and you won’t have worry about checking multiple file versions to capture everyone’s edits. All of this works directly inside your desktop Office 365 apps, providing full utilization of computing power compared to web based collaboration.
With the new PDF Viewer and Editor in the Web UI, working on documents is significantly streamlined.
No longer will you need to save files locally and then open them with specific PDF editing apps. The PDF Viewer allows you to view any PDF directly in a browser, while the Editor allows editing directly inside the viewer with 30+ annotation, form filling, and form creation tools. Now you can make changes from anywhere, and on any device.
Contact us if you’re interested in using these new features.