Hacking has the potential of providing grave and broad impacts threatening finances, power grids and privacy. Today in the show, we will talk about an attack on Gmail that you need to be concerned about, also we will share commonly used passwords that you need to change, and the technological advancements that scientists are worried about that can lead to man’s doom.

 

Gmail

Google’s Gmail service, is a service that is used by over 1 billion users around the world. If you have a Google account here is something that you need to be aware of. 

A few days ago, Hackers made the news again with a phishing attack that is stealing login information of users of Gmail. What I find disturbing about this attack is that even seasoned tech users, experts in the tech field are being fooled into providing their emails and passwords to hackers. 

In this latest attack, hackers created a login page for Gmail that looks like the authentic Gmail login page that you normally see when you try to sign in to your Gmail.

The way they pulled this off, is that a hacker sends an email from a name of one of your contacts, on seeing this you automatically think that this is a valid email from someone you know, now, on opening that email there is an attachment that looks normal. It has a name that you can relate to. 

By trying to open the attachment a new tab opens to the fake Gmail login page. Here you’re ask to sign in to view the attachment. By entering your email and password you are giving your login credentials over to the hacker and thus compromising your account.

In response to this attack, Google said: “We’re aware of this issue and continue to strengthen our defenses against it. We help protect users from phishing attacks in a variety of ways, including: machine learning-based detection of phishing messages, Safe Browsing warnings that notify users of dangerous links in emails and browsers, preventing suspicious account sign-ins, and more. Users can also activate two-step verification for additional account protection.”

If you are a Gmail user and have not set up the 2-step verification, I would highly recommend that you do so. The link is: https://www.google.com/landing/2step/

For the full story, go here: http://itincanadaonline.ca/index.php/c-level-insight/security/2007-tech-experts-fooled-by-latest-phishing-attack 

 

Commonly used passwords

Despite being warned many times by security experts to set strong passwords, people are still using easy and guessable password for their online lives.

In 2016, a year that we’ve seen a huge amount of cyber-attacks, it is still baffling to experts to see people us passwords like "123456", "qwerty" and "111111" during the course of last year. 

According to Keeper, a password manager software, in 2016 they sifted through 10 million passwords from data breaches that happened in year and they found that 50 per cent, that is 1 out of every two people use the top 25 most common passwords, and almost one in five - of all users having "123456" as their protective code. 

If you are guilty of this, I am pleading with you, please change your password by using a variety of numbers, letters, symbols and upper and lower cases in your passwords and don’t use a string of numbers or letters on your keyboard or use this site: http://correcthorsebatterystaple.net

 

Cyber and Doomsday 

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has moved the Doomsday Clock ahead by 30 seconds, taking the world to 2½ minutes to midnight. This is the first time that it was moved by 30 seconds since it was first used in 1947 as a means to measure how close we are to destroying ourselves. 

There are a few factors that weighed heavily in making the decision to push the clock closer to midnight, mainly climate change and the talk about more nuclear weapons. But there is another concern as well, it’s technological – in the cyber and artificial intelligence fields.

 

Thanks for listening.