CISA, the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure agency, has recently released a report on Managed Service Providers (MSPs). The agency recognizes that MSPs play a critical role for businesses, providing IT services that would otherwise be too costly or too time-consuming and resource-intensive.

Following a series of headline-grabbing ransomware attacks that disrupted critical services in the US, FBI Director Christopher Wray likened the threat posed by ransomware to the September 11 terrorist attacks of 2001. According to Wray, recent attacks against one of the largest oil pipeline operators in the United States and a major meat processing operation may be just a harbinger of what is to come.

I realized early on that if I didn’t teach my kids how to identify and avoid likely attacks on their laptops and phones, that no one would. Nevertheless, when I see an opportunity for a “teachable security moment” I grab it, and last week this mobile phishes appeared on my phone. I captured a screen shot to share with my children and we played a little “spot the phish” game, where they would point out all the things that made this text suspicious.

Banks continue to be a top target for cyber criminals. As we indicated in our blogpost on the risks to financial services networks, in 2020 alone there were more than 1,500 cyberattacks on banks, and in recent months, we’ve seen incidents such as the cyberattack on the New Zealand Federal Reserve and against the largest bank in Ecuador. Now, a new threat has emerged, and the main targets are Australian and German banks.

A document sent to the US Congress published by Motherboard, the technology section of Vice, confirms that CIA personnel, the NSA and other members of the US Intelligence Community widely use ad blockers in their Internet browsers. This measure was adopted to remove the distraction of adverts on web pages for employees, but it provides additional protection against malware.