The Security Mindset

It is Cyber Awareness Month and this year there is an increased focus on users as the attack surface. With the bad actors seeking multiple vulnerabilities, we are seeing relentless social engineering attacks including phishing (by email/ messaging), vishing (by phone), and smishing (by text) to gain unauthorized access and conduct financial harm. It is time to make cyber security ubiquitous and create the Security Mindset. This is a sought-after quality of a cybersecurity professional.

The first step is to KNOW YOUR ENEMY. We need to know who the threats are to our security and what is the way to stop them. This helps to combat the latest trends in cybercrime.

As an example, have you heard of pig butchering? It is an investment scam that starts with an innocuous text message or voice call. The scammer forms a relationship with their victim over an extended period of time, usually under romantic pretenses. This is unusually common. Pig butchering schemes often start with solicitations of modest investments. They involve some type of fake claim or falsified dashboard that shows your assets exponentially growing, with the intent being to encourage larger and larger investments. Such scams have grown dramatically recently, with individual investors losing hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Pig butchering has alarmed many law enforcement agencies (Santa Clara DA office REACT Task Force led by Deputy DA Erin West , Michigan DAG office ) and the mass media outlets ( see Forbes , Wall Street Journal , CNN , CBS News and San Francisco Examiner ).

Understand more from this informative blog by Deputy DA Erin West from Santa Clara county.

Further, what can you do? Some practical tips:

More now than ever, bring in basic digital hygiene into play. This is so that your passwords and your information is difficult to crack, even by a computer using hacking programs.

• Create string passwords that are long and complex
• Utilize something unique to you or somebody else
• Purposely misspell words, use abbreviations, add numbers and special characters

This image from www.security.org is a great guideline: