The heat is rising fast in the cybersecurity world. At a recent conference in Phoenix, AZ, we saw how the industry’s top hackers and defense experts team up to fight an ever-increasing number of invasion attempts from bad actors around the world. Visiting a cybersecurity war room really opened our eyes.

We were ushered into a huge room, full of screens that hackers and defenders used to monitor traffic. This link, which shows the origins of constant firewall attacks from all around the world, made a huge impression on me. The attacks were detected because they had an invalid format or invalid character. It meant that the hackers probably forgot to change the language they were using to launch the attack.

My takeaway is that if hackers get smarter or pay more attention to details, they can become more lethal. They can use AI (artificial intelligence) to eliminate the need to know English, and that’s scary. For example, as we saw, they can use Chat GPT to create malware with a specific task. It’s only going to get worse as we hit the holiday shopping season.

Helping a client deal with an email hack brought home all the dangers. They thought they had an email hack, which resulted in emails going to their contacts under the guise of coming from them about file sharing in Dropbox. They thought they had it fixed, but the same problem cropped up two weeks later. It had a link to click (always a danger sign when the recipient “trusts” the sender).

As we got into the process of fixing the hack, it involved an apple.com account with a reference to Dropbox. Our efforts were hampered by the difficulty we had getting into accounts to verify that the hackers were using Dropbox to launch bogus email.

Our client could have just ignored the problem, or they could have sent an email to their entire contact list to warn them not to open emails with the Dropbox reference. But my preference and theirs was to get to the root of the problem. You have to know where all the dots and connections are so that you can get ahead of the hackers and shut them out.

We can help you stay secure by auditing your cybersecurity practices and implementing programs to strengthen your defenses. Call us – 973-433-6676 – or email us to discuss your cybersecurity and gain more peace of mind.