'Email is dead. It's a thing of the past.' In the IT industry, this statement, or something like it, is said regularly — usually corresponding with the rise of a new communication or collaboration platform. Each time this happens, it's prudent to remember a general rule around tools: as long as they retain specific advantages for the human beings using them, they generally endure.

In recent years the outbreak and spread of COVID-19 have left many people with fears and questions. With various medical opinions, news outlets spreading varied statistics, case number and death reports, and safety recommendations that varied between countries, states, cities, and individual businesses, people often felt desperate for information.

On Saturday November 13th, hundreds of thousands of recipients received an email from the FBI with the subject line of “Urgent: Threat actor in systems.” Thankfully for the recipients, it turned out the threat described in these emails wasn’t real as, unfortunately, the FBI had suffered an external email breach resulting in fake warning messages being sent out.

Ransomware has quite rightly been one of biggest ongoing stories of 2021 – and not just in the world of cybersecurity. The biggest ransomware cases where major companies have been forced to a halt until they pay a ransom have made global, headline news. The impact to victim organizations is usually financial loss and reputational damage. However, in cases such as the Colonial Pipelines attack, ransomware has caused real-world impacts on the general public too.

Many Gmail users were recently greeted with a message that alerted them that 2-step verification will be required to log into their accounts starting on November 9th (today). While many in the security community have been advising people to turn on 2-factor, 2-step, or any other secondary security method on every account as a way to protect the login process, the Twitterverse showed that many people were unhappy with Google’s implementation of this mandatory change.

I realized early on that if I didn’t teach my kids how to identify and avoid likely attacks on their laptops and phones, that no one would. Nevertheless, when I see an opportunity for a “teachable security moment” I grab it, and last week this mobile phishes appeared on my phone. I captured a screen shot to share with my children and we played a little “spot the phish” game, where they would point out all the things that made this text suspicious.

Web browsers and email clients are used to interact with external and internal assets. Both applications can be used as a point of entry within an organization. Users of these applications can be manipulated using social engineering attacks. A successful social engineering attack needs to convince users to interact with malicious content. A successful attack could give an attacker an entry point within an organization.