Welcome to the first news post - This one will be brief, since I'm still figuring out the intricacies of building my own site.
Anyone else see the Russian spear fishing attempts after Donald Trump's victory? Reuters has a pretty interesting article on this, which I linked, but essentially a Russian hacking group named Cozy Bear has sent a few spear phishing emails to D.C based Think Tanks. Cozy Bear is the same group many believe hacked the Democratic National Convention, and no doubt they are looking for info on the upcoming administration's policies and how they will be implemented.
If you don't know what spear phishing is, I'll try to give a quick explanation. Ever gotten one of those scam auto "extended warranty" letters in the mail? It looks just like a real letter from an automobile company, and no doubt many of you probably had to look closely before you realized it wasn't from the manufacturer of your car. Same principle applies here - It's a carefully crafted email meant to trick recipients into clicking on a malicious link or downloading a malicious attachment. Sometimes attackers use official logos, such as ones from banks or universities, in order to trick you into thinking the email came from a legitimate source.
For those who want to know more: Click here to go to a nice explanation on how you can detect and avoid these scams.
For those of you who run IT in a organization, here's a nice article from FireEye on how you can help stop these attacks against your end-users.
It'll be interesting to watch this closely in the upcoming days, as the response from the U.S. regarding cyber attacks from Russia could set an interesting precedent going into the next administration.