Social Engineering - The Growing Art of Human Persuasion

CIOs have traditionally been combating data attacks through technology, but there’s another looming threat gaining attention that bypasses those efforts – targeted social engineering.

One kind of threat, called “spear phishing,” uses targeted attack methods that manipulate employees into giving up access to your company's system. They usually come in the form of an email and when your employee clicks on a link, it installs a virus or trojan that allows the attacker to gain access.

It can be an official looking internal document that lures your employee to follow certain instructions, or an email from an attacker who befriended your employee on a social network site like Twitter or Facebook in which they deceive them into checking out a link they sent. Little do they know it's a trap that will expose your business data.

Earlier this year, an online scammer made off with Social Security numbers after sending a virus to a computer at the Department of Human Services office in Coos Bay. An email was sent to multiple employees within the department but only one clicked on the link, which then downloaded an application that recorded keystrokes and sent them to an external address.

MTV Networks was also breached when an employee's computer was compromised through an internet connection. Experts said an employee may have fallen victim to a social engineering trick that allowed a trojan to be installed on their machine. Data included the names, Social Security numbers, birth dates and salaries of around 5,000 employees.

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Top Printing Tips to Save Money
reprinted with permission from the HP Small Business Center

It’s a common sight in many offices: wastebaskets filled to the brim with paper. Look next to any desk or printer, and you’re likely to find a stack of misprints, extra copies and other discarded paper waste.

So here are a few things to keep in mind before you send that next job to the printer – and a few tips to keep costs down when you do need to print.

Do you really want to print that?
You should always consider whether what you’re about to print really needs to be printed. For example, if you have to share a document with a number of people at a meeting, are there other ways to display it without printing out a copy for everyone? If it’s a large meeting, maybe use a projector to display the information, or just display it on a notebook screen at a smaller meeting. You could also save the document to a shared folder and provide everyone with a link, or send it as an email attachment.

Conservation: waste not, want not
If you’ve decided you absolutely must print a document, there are some ways to reduce the cost and environmental impact. If it’s just for casual use, you can print in ‘draft’ mode and by reusing misprints by printing on the “clean” side of the page. Most important, when you print on both the front and back of each page, you reduce your paper use by up to 50 percent. You can make this easy by purchasing a printer with a built-in duplexer, and setting the default settings in your driver to “print on both sides”.

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