Author Archive for: GLivingstone

That’s $2,742,354,049 lost to Business Email Compromise in the US in 2022

That number is eight times the population of the United States. If you stacked that number of dollar bills like a giant deck of cards and laid them horizontally, it would take you more than a day to drive that distance.

Unless you’re aware of the continually evolving cyber-threats, how can you make the most informed decisions about how to protect your organization?

As Bryley partner Barracuda describes them, Business Email Compromise (BEC) attacks are audacious. The over 2.7-billion-dollar losses suffered via BEC far outstrip the money lost to ransomware – in 2022 there were $34 million dollars in reported ransomware payouts. And to pull off a BEC attack takes a lot more know-how and investment than ransomware does – Ransomware-as-a-Service can be found cheap – it’s like subscribing to a cloud service – on the dark web. BEC actors are stealthy, manipulative and tend to go big, to make it much harder for employees to suspect them … [5 min. read]

“Turn on syncing?” the browser asked.

“Syncing” tells the browser to allow stored credentials to be available across a person’s devices. And, why not? Sounds convenient.

Well, maybe the browser account password was phished. Or maybe the browser password had been reused from some other, previously compromised account. Whatever the exact reason, syncing turned out to be a problem when the personal browser account got hacked.

And the real problem was that a work login was found by the criminals among the passwords stored by the browser – and these work credentials were used to steal company data and lock the company systems with ransomware.

It’s easy to say the person shouldn’t have had a work login in a personal account. True enough, but what’s the reason someone would be doing that anyway? What things could the business management have done to have prevented this scenario from unfolding? [6 min. read]

I’m sure you remember that school was difficult and trying for the classes of 2020 and 2021. Early-on courses moved online. Then restrictions were changed multiple times. Commencements were put off. Courtney had been studying Business Administration and Interior Design at Bay Path University. So in that unprecedented time Courtney Leonard decided to step out into the professional world. Courtney began this phase of her life as a print production lead for Staples where she quickly became a supervisor.

The past year Courtney has been in Client Services at Bryley where she was recently promoted to a combined role as Client Experience Specialist and Marketing Coordinator … [4 min. read]

Kristin Pryor was recently named Vice President of IT Operations. Kristin joined Bryley Systems in 2019 as Director of Technical Services. An early sign of her executive aptitude was watching that “whenever there was any kind of a break from dealing with the day-to-day demands of an IT department, Kristin would move into strategic mode,” President Garin Livingstone said.

“Kristin’s not afraid of taking on anything,” Anna said. “And she loves tech. She loves what she’s doing. And this comes through. She always makes herself available. She looks at things and asks, ‘how can we make this better?’ And also she points out when something is working well at one client and asks, ‘can we do the same thing for other clients, too?’ …” [4 min. read]

Whatever your cybersecurity paradigm, it’s valuable to have your networked systems checked regularly – you want to make sure what you’re doing is in fact keeping your network protected. An outside audit can bring a new perspective and reveal weaknesses in your system that those who work in it every day may miss. And so Bryley is unveiling its Four-Point IT Systems Quality Check at the Business Expo April … [2 min. read]