Month: October 2018

In a previous article written for the Cyber-Security Awareness Month I talked about “spear-phishing“. Spear-phishing attacks target the university specifically instead of just sending out random “shot in the dark” emails that someone will hopefully fall for. Spear-phishing has been notoriously successful because scammers focus on university employees and student internet activity and send requests that look like the real thing, claiming to be from entities within the environment that you actually deal with. In the past couple of years we have had a couple of large-scale spear-phishing attacks that resulted in a number of student and personnel accounts...

When we use the term “hacker” in our day-to-day conversation, we tend to associate it with the type of attacker who uses their technical expertise to break into protected computer systems and compromise sensitive data. We hear about this breed of hacker in the news all the time, and we invest millions of rands in new technologies to improve our network defenses. However, there is another type of attacker who use their tactics to bypass even the most expensive and effective cyber-security technology. They are the social engineers, hackers who exploit the one weakness that is found in each...

In the last article, I warned you that we  shouldn’t think that identity theft is always “high-tech”, because it can can happen to anyone, even if they don’t have a computer and don’t make use of social media or even own a cell-phone. In this article I will concentrate on the “high-tech” methods of identity theft. The identity thief’s goal is always to obtain personal information about you, such as your ID Number, your bank or credit card account numbers, information contained in your credit report, or the existence and size of your savings and investment portfolios so they...

In the last article I provided you with a few tips on how to create strong passwords, in order to make the hackers job harder at accessing your personal data, in other words, “How do scammers get your information?”. But where do scammers get your information? The graphic below depicts the world where most of us find ourselves, and where scammers might obtain important snippets of our personal data that, in many cases, is there for the taking: Your personal information is in places beyond your control! The cellphone has become a indispensable communications tool in the 21st century....