Hacking Humans

This week we are joined by Maria Varmazis, host of the N2K daily space show, T-Minus. Maria shares an interesting story from a listener, who writes in on an AirBnB debacle he was dealing with. Joe shares the newly released 2024 Data Breach Investigations Report from Verizon. Dave shares a story From the New York Magazine, written by Ezra Marcus, on a college sophomore from University of Miami who was found to be tangled up in a refund fraud scam that granted him a lavish lifestyle. Our catch of the day comes from Joe's mother this week. She happened to receive an email with the subject line being "your order is confirmed," coming from what looks to be "McAfee." Please take a moment to fill out an audience survey! Let us know how we are doing! Links to the stories: The Package King of Miami 2024 Data Breach Investigations Report You can hear more from the T-Minus space daily show here.Have a Catch of the Day you'd like to share? Email it to us at hackinghumans@thecyberwire.com.

A nation-state hacking group’s practice of funding its town activities through cybercrime or cyber mercenary work.

Perry Carpenter from KnowBe4 and Dr. Jessica Barker from Cygenta discuss human risk, relationship scams, social engineering, Phorpiex botnet distributing LockBit 3.0 ransomware, and the story of Paul Raffile getting fired from Facebook before starting. The episode covers email warnings, account security, scams targeting young men, security coaches, human-centric cybersecurity, and empowering individuals for effective cybersecurity.

A device connected to a network that accepts communications from other endpoints like laptops, mobile devices, IoT equipment, routers, switches, and any tool on the security stack.

Maria Varmazis, host of the N2K daily space show, T-Minus, discusses the evolving tactics of ransomware attackers towards psychological manipulation. The podcast also covers bank scammers using genuine push notifications, North Korean social engineering attacks through email security loopholes, and a listener's experience with a fake email from the U.S. Social Security Department.

An extension of the traditional Basic Input/Output System or BIOS that, during the boot process, facilitates the communication between the computer’s firmware and the computer’s operating system.

Security expert Bogdan Botezatu from Bitdefender discusses audio deepfakes scams. Stories include a game changer in social engineering, a grandmother falling victim to a pig butchering scam, and a catch of the day email scam about puppies.

An operating system program running in the background designed to perform a specific task when certain conditions or events occur.

Join Maria Varmazis, host of N2K daily space show, as she discusses a man scammed out of $25,000 calling Geek Squad. Dave and Joe share listener updates on Facebook scams and toll scam alerts. Learn about social engineering takeovers in open source projects and an ex-athletic director arrested with a gun. Catch of the day: an email scam selling puppies.

Also known as spyware and adware, it is a software category where developers design the application neither to cause explicit harm nor to accomplish some conventional legitimate purpose, but when run, usually annoys the user and often performs actions that the developer did not disclose, and that the user regards as undesirable.