Up Times • June 2022

Business Continuity Mixtape – Bryley-curated stories from around the internet:

Picture what phishing could look like in the metaverse. It won’t be a fake email from your bank. It could be an avatar of a teller in a virtual bank lobby asking for your information. It could be an impersonation of your CEO inviting you to a meeting in a malicious virtual conference room, from the blog of Bryley partner Microsoft. Now is the time to consider and plan for the privacy and fraud implications of the coming virtual world (or more likely many virtual worlds) … [5 min. read] microsoft.com

Bryley partner HP is reporting an increase in PDF attachments in phishing attacks. PDF files have capabilities similar to those of a web page … they can interact with remote sites, launch local programs and contain embedded files. PDFs can also include clickable links and JavaScript, which can be exploited for malicious purposes, Ivan Righi a threat analyst explained. In the HP report malicious PDFs were made to look like invoices and unleashed key-logging malware to steal data by recording a victim’s keystrokes … [5 min. read] theregister.com

The risk here is not that the AI is truly sentient but that we are well-poised to create sophisticated machines that can imitate humans to such a degree that we cannot help but anthropomorphize them—and that large tech companies can exploit this in deeply unethical ways. As an example: what would you reveal to an AI medical helper? And can this collected data be used against you in applying for a job or applying for insurance? … [5 min. read] wired.com

PII aka Personally Identifiable Information is according to the Dept of Homeland Security: any information that permits the identity of an individual to be directly or indirectly inferred, which if lost, compromised, or disclosed without authorization could result in substantial harm, embarrassment, inconvenience, or unfairness to an individual. This definition and topic came up in a recent blog post from the Univ. of Utah’s IT department. Bottom-line: take care of your PII – and though there are machine-learning ways to keep us from broadcasting the information insecurely, why engage in risky behavior? … [6 min. read] it.utah.edu

With data being sold and shared and breaches happening regularly, why give your real email addresses to merchants, websites, and other contacts? This was the thinking behind Apple’s recent Hide My Email service. But there have been other ways of accomplishing the same email-alias creation for many years. Several of these let you conduct email conversations in private with convenient iOS, Android and browser integrations … [7 min. read] pcmag.com

^{Note: The Mixtape section is Bryley’s curated list of external stories. Bryley does not take credit for the content of these stories, nor does it endorse or imply an affiliation with the authors or publications in which they appear.}