Category: News and Views

Security Awareness: Phishing up the weakest links! | TekSec

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phishing-security-awarenessWho (in their right mind) would like to appear as the corporate dunce who infected their company network (by clicking on an email attachment or url)? Not you, not me, and certainly not the PR department or the company CEO’s administrative assistant, or even the CEO himself.

Phishing is an activity that cybercriminals utilize to acquire personal and sensitive information. Whether it is an account username and password, credit card details, a social security number, or other personal data — it is designed to coax you into giving up your personal information for criminal gain. For those of us who have been unfortunate enough to click on a deceptive phishing link or email attachment, it is an event that most of us would probably rather forget.

Phishing it up

Most of us are aware that if an email arrives unsolicited and includes grammatical errors, we should just delete it and continue on with our day. Not all phishing emails contain bad grammar, unsolicited attachments, or immediately request sensitive information. Last summer I received an email that appeared quite genuine, so genuine in fact — that I almost became victim to a very clever phishing scheme.

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Young people are buying real estate — just not the same kind as their parents | Business Insider

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Millennials and younger members of Gen X appear to be delaying the financial responsibility of homeownership.

But it’s hard to blame a group who watched the housing market skyrocket and plummet just as they were entering college or becoming young professionals gearing up to buy a starter home.

As the economy improved, and financial arrested development started to end, some 20- to 30-somethings have started to invest in real estate, but not in the traditional sense.

Many have turned to turnkey properties, which offer the opportunity to become a homeowner while adding another revenue stream to an investment portfolio.

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11 dead, 12 missing after record floods swamp Texas and Oklahoma | Mashable

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UPDATED 1:15 p.m. ET: With the addition of three fatalities in the Houston area, the death toll from the Memorial Day weekend storms in Texas and Oklahoma has now risen to 11. This figure is expected to rise based on the number of people still missing from the flash flood in Wimberley, Texas.

Authorities are still searching for 12 members of two families who went missing over the weekend when sudden, raging floodwaters swept a vacation home away in Wimberley, Texas. Those family members are now presumed to have perished in the flood, according to the emergency operations center in Hays County, Texas.

The floods have been a remarkable turn of events for a region that was still mired in drought as of three weeks ago. That drought, which had affected Texas since 2010, is now effectively over in most areas, as is a long-running drought in Oklahoma.

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Woman Billed $1,000 For Credit Card Error Gets $83 Million Verdict, But IRS Gets Last Laugh |Forbes

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download (1)Juries sometimes do strange things, and one in Missouri has ordered a company that buys up consumer debts to pay an astounding $83 million to Maria Guadalupe Mejia of Kansas City. Why, you may ask? The jury said the credit company wrongly tried to collect an erroneous $1,000 credit card bill. Credit.com has an extensive story about this shocker, the woman who sues a debt collector, and then wins $83 Million. KCUR reported the verdict and the jury finding that the defendant–Portfolio Recovery Associates LLC–was guilty of violating the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act.

That law contains many safeguards for borrowers. With the small $1,000 disputed debt, as you might imagine, most of the verdict was for allegedly bad conduct, The verdict called for $250,000 in damages plus a few dollars shy of $83 million in punitive damages. The verdict calls it malicious prosecution, the debt not being hers to begin with.

PRA Group Inc., which owns Portfolio Recovery Associates, sent an email statement to Credit.com: “This outlandish verdict defies all common sense,” wrote spokesman Michael McKeon. “We hope and expect the judge will set aside this inappropriate award, and we plan to file motions to make that request formally in the near term. Any fair reading of the facts of this case makes plain that a verdict of this size is not justice by any means, and cannot stand.”

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New Ruling Is a Stark Reminder That Your Image Isn’t Yours | WIRED

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CINDY LEE GARCIA said she’d been had. The actress claimed that she thought she was acting in an action-adventure thriller called Desert Warrior, but her performance was co-opted into five seconds of Innocence of Muslims, a 14-minute trailer mocking the Islamic prophet Mohammed that sparked an anti-American backlash in the Middle East and led to death threats for the actors involved. The inflammatory clip was first uploaded to Google-owned YouTube in June 2012, and a few months later Garcia sued Google demanding that what she called the “hateful anti-Islamic production” be taken down.

Garcia first filed a suit in Los Angeles Superior Court, but a judge refused to have it removed, even as she claimed she was receiving death threats. She then filed a suit in federal court, yielding the same response. After all, video creators own the rights to their creations, not actors. Last year, however, a three-judge panel on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals shocked First Amendment and copyright attorneys around the country when it found in Garcia’s favor, determining that her performance was “independently copyrightable.” Google removed the video.

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Mini Is the New Supersized | Adweek

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mini-foods-hed-2015Food and beverage giants are shrinking their offerings. Why? Consumers view sugar and fat to be the new tobacco, according to new research by Havas Worldwide, which found that in the last year 42 percent of consumers have reduced their sugar intake while 38 percent of consumers have decreased fat consumption. “Smaller sizes have always been appealing for products perceived as indulgent,” explained Tim Maleeny, Havas’ chief strategy officer, managing partner. “Somehow the smaller serving offsets a sense of guilt.” For brands, going small may be key to their business, noted Allen Adamson, North American chairman at brand consulting firm Landor Associates. “The alternative—if they don’t do this—is consumers will drop them off the shopping list, and that’s deadly for a brand,” he said.

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Is It Time For Companies To Pay For Not Paying Enough? The “Walmart Tax” Gains Momentum | Co.Exist

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downloadMaking minimum wage dooms you to a life of hardship and toil. We in the U.S. have accepted or ignored this situation for a long time, while companies make billions of dollars by paying their workers less than enough to survive. But a national discussion about income inequality and the wave of worker protests for livable wages has brought attention to the issue. And now some policymakers want to add to the debate by focusing not just on the poor living conditions that result from low wages, but on the billions of dollars that the low-wage service economy costs every single taxpayer, as we pay for things like food stamps and health care for workers whose companies don’t pay them enough to live on.

Every year, U.S. taxpayers pay $153 billion in public assistance to working families, according to a recent study conducted by the University of California’s Berkeley Center for Labor Research and Education. This is more than the annual budgets of the U.S. Department of Education and Health and Human Services combined.

Paying low-wage employees more by raising the minimum wage—$15 an hour is what “livable” wage advocates are fighting for—is likely the most direct solution. But barring this, a few Connecticut lawmakers want to be the first in the nation to end what they see as essentially a massive payout to the Walmarts and McDonald’s of their state.

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Are We Headed for an Egg Shortage? | Bloomberg Business

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Joe Greco, who’s been churning out cookies and cakes for 27 years, usually uses about 600 pounds of liquid eggs a week at his bakery near Chicago. Now, his freezer has seven times that amount because Greco worries that record prices are about to go even higher.

The cost of breaker eggs — those cracked and sold in liquid form for use by wholesale bakers and restaurants such as McDonald’s Corp. — have more than doubled in the past three weeks. The culprit behind the surge: the worst-ever American outbreak of the bird flu virus.

More than 33.5 million chickens, turkeys and other birds have been affected. Iowa, the top U.S. egg producer, was hardest hit, losing 40 percent of its laying hens. The disease prompted the government to forecast the first annual drop in egg production since 2008. Greco is concerned his 4,200-pound (1,900-kilogram) stash of liquid eggs won’t protect him from higher costs, and that he’ll have to start buying eggs still in shells to crack by hand.

“As soon as I heard about the bird flu, I knew this was going to happen,” said Greco, 47, who owns Palermo Bakery in Norridge, Illinois, near Chicago’s O’Hare Airport. He’s been racing to buy extra supplies over the past month and saw prices for the pails of liquid eggs he buys jump 28 percent last week. “After the Fourth of July, there might be another nightmare, so I’m still shopping around to see if there are better prices.”

Highly pathogenic avian influenza spread rapidly through parts of the Midwest in the past two months, and Iowa lost about 23 million hens. Post Holdings Inc. has warned that bird flu will hurt fiscal 2015 earnings at its food-service unit, while countries in the Middle East and Asia have placed restrictions on shipments of U.S. poultry.

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AOL – the internet survivor | BBC News

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AOL, the firm which told you “you’ve got mail” and delivered more CDs to your door than Amazon, is being bought by Verizon.

The deal values AOL at $4.4bn (£2.8bn), a long way from the mammoth $222bn price tag the company attracted 16 years ago during a boom in the share prices of technology firms.

AOL started life as Quantum Computer Services, which first provided an online service for the Commodore 64 computer system in 1985.

The company built up its position as one of the largest internet providers, gobbling up browser company Netscape and competitor CompuServe.

Then came AOL’s purchase of Time Warner in a deal valued at more than $160bn in 2000. Nine years later, Time Warner reversed the acquisition and AOL began to reinvent itself as a media company with former Google advertising executive Tim Armstrong at the helm.

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