Quick Intelligence Blog

The CBC News has recently reported on a scam targeting job seekers. The scam works by offering desperate job seekers an amazing “work from home” opportunity. They are also told that the company will send them a cheque to purchase office supplies from a third party and are instructed to e-transfer the money to that third party. The problem is that the job offer isn’t real, the cheques are bad, and once the cheque bounces, you are on the hook for the money.

The Calgary Herald has reported that the Calgary Police Service, along with the RCMP, have helped arrest members of international cyber crime family Sodinokibi. Police agency Europol says that the Sodinokibi family was responsible for 7,000 internet infections worldwide, 600 of them in Canada.

Business buzz words like “digital transformation” get thrown around a lot in conversation, but what does it really mean? Bill Schmarzo in an article for CIO Magazine defined digital transformation as the “application of digital capabilities to processes, products, and assets to improve efficiency, enhance customer value, manage risk, and uncover new monetization opportunities.” As business owners, we all want to improve efficiency while enhancing customer value, managing risk and monetizing new opportunities.

A survey by data management company, Cohesity, found that 40% of American consumers don’t want businesses to pay ransomware demands to cyber criminals. The study elicited responses from more than 1,000 U.S. consumers ages 18 and older. Moreover, 23% of those surveyed said they'd stop doing business with a company that paid a ransom. Further 48% would consider not doing business with a company that paid a ransom.

Anyone who has ever taken a goal setting workshop is familiar with the phrase “not having a plan is planning to fail.” When it comes to cyber security, if you don’t have a cyber security protection and response plan, you are certain to face a cyber security failure of some sort.

Malware is loosely defined as software that, when installed on your pc, laptop, mobile device or server, does things that you really don’t want it to do. It could delete files, change your browser path, or create what’s known as a C&C (Command & Control) connection to an external server, allowing a hacker to connect directly into your PC without you knowing. It can run silently and hidden in the background, stealing your banking credentials when you log into the bank.

Computer viruses are bits of computer code that are designed to perform a specific purpose and are usually designed to propagate from one computer to another on a network. Just like viruses in the human body, a virus on a computer or network can make that computer “sick” meaning it doesn’t function the way it’s supposed to.

Nowadays, the digital equivalent of the wild west is called the Dark Web. The dark web is a subset of the internet that is intentionally hidden and not indexed. To access the Dark Web, a specific browser, like Tor, is required. Unavailable to the casual internet user, the Dark Web houses a treasure trove of stolen information, offering it for sale and trade on chat groups and online forums.

A firewall is software or hardware that sits at the edge of your network, between your company and the Internet. It’s designed to keep hackers out and to allow legitimate connections into your network if needed. Legitimate connections may include access to email, access to a company website or corporate cloud apps.

They say a fence is only as strong as its weakest link, that holds true with cyber security as well. With most companies outsourcing services to companies like yours (and ours!), what we do to protect ourselves directly impacts the overall cyber security postures of our customers.