The big story this week in the IT media has been the scandal surrounding Uber and their attempts to conceal their massive data breaches.
On Wednesday MailGuard CEO and author Craig McDonald published a blog post analysing the missteps the Uber company made handling their cybercrime crisis:
Uber Crisis
"Uber’s handling of their ongoing cybercrime crisis has landed them in a situation where they are now dealing with a legal battle and a public relations meltdown as well. The key problem here is lack of transparency. I talk a lot about the importance of sharing information around cybersecurity issues because if we’re going to survive the war on cybercrime, we’ve got to start realising that secrecy serves the objectives of the criminals, and always ends up being damaging to a business in the end. There’s no way to realistically calculate the financial harm to Uber that will result from breaking trust with their customers like they did. Suffice to say that the old maxim ‘all publicity is good publicity’ probably doesn’t apply when the headlines are about your company allowing millions of customer credit card details to fall into criminal hands. There will, eventually, be a specific number that can be attached to Uber’s legal costs fighting this case in the US courts, but that bill will probably keep adding up for years to come. Even when the litigation is over, Uber will be bearing the stigma of bad publicity that comes from a scandal like this for years..."
Read the rest of Craig McDonald's article, here.
Scam Amazon Emails
This week, the MailGuard system has been detecting a lot of criminal-intent emails linking to fake invoices and receipts. On Thursday we saw a particularly opportunistic one trying to cash in on the hype around Amazon's Australian launch:
"Amazon is in the process of launching a host of new services in Australia, so this fraudulent email leveraging their brand-name is clearly trying to capitalise on the current buzz around the company. These emails are trying to entice victims to click on the ‘order confirmation receipt’ link. The link actually opens a zipped JavaScript file. JavaScript files are not used for simple documents like receipts, so they are a red flag for scam detection..."
Get all the details about this scam on the blog, here.
Jargon Explained
Bot-nets, brandjacking, whaling... cybersecurity has a huge lexicon of specialised terms that can be bewildering to non-tech people. Cybercrime is growing very fast so it’s becoming increasingly important for businesspeople to be across the cybersecurity lingo. With that in mind, the MailGuard Blog has published a glossary of Cybersecurity Jargon for Businesspeople. If you've ever wondered what a catfish is, or how dangerous a zombie network can be, read the post here.
Protect Your Business
If your company is using an integrated productivity platform like Office 365, then you already know the benefits of cloud-based technology. Doing business online opens up opportunities for collaboration communication on an unprecedented level, but with that opportunity comes significant risk. Cybercriminals utilise sophisticated AI technology to monitor business and social networks and they exploit the data they collect to infiltrate organisations. All criminals need to break into your business is a cleverly worded email; if they can trick one person in your company into clicking on a malicious link they can gain access to your data.
For a few dollars per staff member per month, you can protect your business with MailGuard's cloud-based email and web filtering security.
Talk to an expert at MailGuard today about making your company's network secure: click here.
Stay up-to-date with new posts on the MailGuard Blog by subscribing to free updates. Click on the button below:
