By Rex M. Lee

In my previous article, Social Engineering Security Attacks Part 1, we learned that a single security breach can cost an organization between $4.5 - $10+ million dollars, and that’s just to research the breach, according to IBM’s 2022 Cost of a Data Breach Report.

Part 1 highlighted some of the most common social engineering attacks. However, there are other attack vectors associated with social engineering attacks that we will examine here.

Social engineering attacks are simply defined as attacks centered on taking advantage of human psychology through deception in order to acquire confidential and protected information. 

According to IBM’s 2022 “Cost of a Data Breach Report”, aside from legal fees the average cost of a breach is approximately $4.5 million dollars globally and nearly $10 million dollars in the United States. Furthermore, the report states that 90% of all breaches occur due to human error. Although these types of attacks are nearly 100% preventable, most companies do not have the right incident response policies in place to prevent these attacks in the first place.

– Rex Lee, Privacy and Cybersecurity Advisor

By Rob Enderle / October 21, 2022

Typically, when you talk about powering an electrical device or car wirelessly, you are talking about inductive charging. This is generally accomplished by placing the device on an inductive charger or just over it. Inductive charging typically has a range measured in fractions of an inch, which makes it a far cry from Nicola Tesla’s vision of a world powered wirelessly.

But what if you could power or charge devices at a greater range measured in feet rather than fractions of an inch, and could deliver enough power over longer ranges to support wireless IoT sensors and do so relatively cheaply?

By Rex M. Lee

Due to the proliferation of intrusive operating systems (OS) and apps that support smartphones, many businesses; major corporations; government entities, including the military; law enforcement agencies; healthcare providers; legal professionals; and journalists have adopted smartphones to use professionally within a confidential and protected work environment.

Intrusive operating systems and apps enable the developers to indiscriminately monitor, track, and data mine the end user for profits which means that the developers are collecting confidential and protected information from the end user posing privacy and cybersecurity threats to the end user.

The other day a colleague called and asked about the best way to find a concept within an enterprise document repository. 

After discussion, an enterprise repository was a bit of a stretch. What she meant was find the concept across the entire enterprise, regardless of where it was stored.

The target concept consisted of a set of management principles. In the current incarnation, the enterprise touted seven principles. After working with a number of consultants, it had honed its principles to five. The goal was to find all references to the seven principles and replace those references with the five.

By DanielW. Rasmus, Serious Insights

CyberTalk TV's Rex M. Lee, Cybersecurity Advisor/Tech Journalist, interviewed by California Today News Regarding Cyberattack On U.S. Airports, Including LAX by Russia's KillNet

California Today, Oct. 17, 2022

By Rob Enderle

IBM has held out the concept of a next- generation, digital assistant for some time. I once hoped that its partnership with Apple would result in a Siri upgrade to Watson that would finally make that poor AI meet expectations. Alas, Siri still sucks, but IBM and Soul Machines just announced they were releasing the IBM Digital Assistant, branded Digital Iris, at the Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport.

By Rob Enderle, September 30, 2022

Over the last decade, and partially as the result of a prior Intel CEO underfunding processor development while AMD remained focused, AMD has arguably passed Intel as the performance king in the segment. Ironically, given Intel’s dominance, they did this on both laptop and desktop systems. Intel is stepping up its game again, and we should see soon if its latest offering can close or even eliminate this performance gap. For now, though, AMD appears to be the performance king.

Let’s talk about AMD’s latest Zen 4 platform and its new AM5 platform which comes with a brand new, and far better, socket.

Since the U.S. government is both unable and seemingly unwilling to protect U.S. corporations and private businesses from nation-state threats, it is incumbent upon board members and senior executives to be at the forefront to a top-down Intelligence, security and privacy strategy that includes corporate counter intelligence and wargaming.

The fact is, companies from China and Russia have been wargaming to prepare for competition since the mid-90s when China officially launched their unrestricted hybrid warfare campaign against the west.

By Rex M. Lee
Rex M. Lee is a Privacy and Cybersecurity Advisor, Tech Journalist and a Senior Tech/Telecom Industry Analyst for BlackOps Partners, Washington, DC. Find more information at My Smart Privacy, www.MySmartPrivacy.com

Cyber Attacks On America: Hackers Use OS & Apps to Launch Attacks

In this special CyberTalk TV episode, China In Focus sat down with TechTalk Summit's Rex M. Lee, cybersecurity adviser.  He helps shed light on cyberattacks on America from nation-state hackers, how they affect us in our daily lives, and what can be done to stop them.

Lee notes how adversarial countries can get in is through intrusive apps and operating systems: “You have to look at an app as legal malware. And that’s the best way you can describe apps today. An app—whether it’s a social media app developed by Bytedance (China), such as TikTok, or Facebook, or Instagram—any of these apps, they are basically legal malware that enable the developer to monitor, track, and data mine the end user for financial gain 24 by seven, 365 days a year.”