Practical cybersecurity springs from the little decisions we make every day. While almost all data breaches are inspired by malicious intent, their successful execution (almost always) involves seemingly harmless and unintentional actions of insiders within organizations. The drivers of cybercrime include some of the following: i). The well-meaning system administrators who fail to promptly apply patches from application vendors or for some reason just run new scripts on the production environment without the first sandbox testing them. ii). Employees who unsuspectingly yield to social engineering ploys specifically spear-phishing resulting in loss of credentials, money, and corporate data to their adversaries…

In mid-June 2020, someone called requesting my help recover his personal Gmail address that had been hacked. You could hear his desperate voice on the other end of the call. He explained that since the coronavirus pandemic, board members decided to be sending all official documents and board packs to several preferred emails of each board member. “Can you recover my Gmail password and get it from the hackers. I am afraid they are going to see all the board papers and details, which will be catastrophic,” he said. Any victim of cybercrime needs their service restored as soon as…

Canberra, 19th June 2020: A massive cyber-attack is spreading across the world, as it causes chaos in its wake. It has been reported in global online media that “On Friday, a massive wave of cyber-attacks swept across 99 countries, with cyber-security experts claiming it could be the biggest attack of its kind ever recorded.” The Australian media reported the following: “Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull insisted that even if we are targeted, the government is prepared. We are continuing to monitor the situation closely and stand ready to deal with any cyber-security threat to Australia’s critical infrastructure,” he said through a…