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Hello, Tuesday! Hope you had a nice, long weekend. Perhaps you did some housekeeping, getting rid of old knickknacks, trash, mankinis, and—wait, what?
In today’s edition:
 Cut-and-dried
 Spam a lot
 Mars attacks
—Amanda Florian, Tom McKay, Patrick Lucas Austin
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Francis Scialabba
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Another one bites the dust. Cisco—an American multinational tech company with a market cap of around $198 billion—is preparing to lay off 5% of its employees. On Wednesday, the company announced a new restructuring plan, leaving more than 4,000 employees without work, according to CNBC. The layoffs come at a time when Cisco is working to “realign the organization and enable further investment in key priority areas,” according to an SEC filing.
Cutting room. This isn’t the first or even second time the company has broken out the snipping tool. Cisco began laying off employees in late 2022 and in July 2023, as IT Brew previously reported.
At the time, Justin Chinich, a spokesperson for Cisco, played it cool, stating in an email to IT Brew that the July layoffs were “part of the rebalancing effort we began in November 2022, which included a limited restructuring impacting our real estate portfolio and approximately 5% of our workforce.”
Read more here.—AF
Do you work in IT or have information about your IT department you want to share? Email [email protected].
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Winter weather is still here (not for long, according to Punxsutawney Phil), but we’re not talkin’ about that kind of bundling up. We’re talking about bundling your compliance.
With a SOC 2 and PCI DSS bundle from Thoropass, you can buy SOC 2 and get 50% off PCI DSS. This limited-time offer helps users achieve a seamless compliance journey without leaving the Thoropass platform.
Thoropass’s in-house auditors will be all up in your convos from Day 1, meaning no surprises or gaps. PS: Thoropass is the only comprehensive compliance and audit solution that leverages in-house auditors and is a Qualified Security Assessor Company (QSAC) for PCI DSS.
Bundle up, save big, and stay compliant.
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Thai Liang Lim/Getty Images
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You’ve got spam. And Leyla Bilge, the director of scam research labs at Gen, wants to dig in. She and her team see around a thousand unique scam messages a week, which doesn’t even include the vast amount of scam emails that millions of Gen’s clients receive.
Gen Digital is home to brands like Norton, Avast, and LifeLock—companies responsible for services used by almost 500 million users around the globe. One of the latest rollouts is Norton’s Genie—a free AI-powered digital assistant that helps users detect scam.
Bilge sat down with IT Brew to talk about scams and how the landscape has shifted from infamous email scams to more modern social media and AI-based ones.
On her day-to-day routine at Gen
Passionate about proactive security, she and her team are involved in helping people before, during, and after scams occur, offering social media and privacy monitoring, among other services. She and her team also have automatic systems in place to help flag fake shopping sites that are actually malicious.
Read more here.—AF
Do you work in IT or have information about your IT department you want to share? Email [email protected].
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Mohammed bin Rashid Space Center
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What kind of convincing does it take to dupe your average email sender to engage in risky download behavior? Some scammers’ lists of lures include opportunities to profit off war, angry customer complaints, and even a free trip to the Red Planet.
In a recent blog post, Proofpoint’s threat research team highlighted three phishing emails relying on lures that went “way beyond the usual level of bizarre.”
One threat actor attempted to use the chaos of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, posing as a partner in an unidentified project in Uzbekistan looking for European clients who could step up to replace beleaguered Ukrainian suppliers. Another campaign involved emails supposedly from an irate customer who wanted to lodge a complaint against the recipients’ customer support staff.
“I am compelled to write about the unacceptable and rude behavior I experienced with your customer service representative,” the email began. “The attached report provides a full account of the incident.”
Keep reading here.—TM
Do you work in IT or have information about your IT department you want to share? Email [email protected]. Want to go encrypted? Ask Tom for his Signal.
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Francis Scialabba
Today’s top IT reads.
Stat: 50,376. That’s the number of scams and cybercrime cases reported to the Singapore Police Force in 2023. (ZDNet)
Quote: “The incident was caused by a third-party caching client library that was recently integrated into our system.”—Wyze, in an email to customers after a glitch allowed users to access images and videos from other customers’ cameras (Ars Technica)
Read: The Ukrainian government has an algorithm that might curb the use of Starlink satellites by Russian troops. (PCMag)
Half comp’d compliance: With a SOC 2 and PCI DSS bundle from Thoropass, you can buy SOC 2 and get 50% off PCI DSS for a limited time. Stay compliant and within budget.* *A message from our sponsor.
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We’re saying we’ll give you free stuff and more friends if you share a link. One link.
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✢ A Note From Thoropass
*Disclaimer: Software only. Levels 2-4 only.
✤ A Note From Thoropass
*Disclaimer: Software only. Levels 2-4 only.
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