A May 2024 report from risk-advisory firm Kroll found that malicious hackers are increasingly putting on their hard hats and going after construction companies.

Kroll found an increase in construction-company incident responses—from 3% to 6%—YOY in Q1 2024. To one Kroll pro, the growth reveals an industry with enticing weak spots and attractive windfalls for malicious hackers.

The most common tactic, according to Kroll’s associate managing director, Laurie Iacono: business email compromise, or attackers sending fraudulent invoices both to and from construction firms.

“This is an industry that has a lot of vendors,” Iacono told IT Brew. “They’re issuing a lot of invoices, and they’re receiving a lot of invoices for all the products and supplies that they have.”

The industry involves frequent onsite digital sign-ins via mobile devices, Kroll’s Q1 report read, and on-the-road employees may be less aware of fraudulent email characteristics.

Read more here.—BH

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Doing business means dealing with paperwork. A lot of it. Automation can help you stay on top of all things documentation, but what happens when doc automation has its own pain points?

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Growing cloud storage provider Wasabi, which has reached 70,000 customers, is hot for a reason. The company, headquartered in Boston, has long gone against the grain in that they don’t charge users egress fees—something that major players like Google, AWS, and Microsoft only recently started doing this year.

IT Brew caught up with Wasabi’s David Boland, vice president of cloud strategy, Aki Wakimoto, the country manager for Japan, and Aaron Edell, senior vice president of artificial intelligence and machine learning, to chat about strategy, hot cloud storage, and what’s next for the unicorn company.

David, what was Wasabi’s reasoning in not charging egress fees?

“When we launched our service in 2017, everybody had egress charges,” Boland told IT Brew. “And doing our market research, [while] talking to customers, talking to partners about the things that bothered them the most about cloud services, egress charges and hidden fees were at the top of the list.”

“It’s those hidden charges—it’s the API request charges, egress charges, and it’s the data retrieval charges that really irritate customers,” he also said. Dropping the charges, he said, is “a trend that’s been going on since 2017.”

“We like to think that we were the first ones there and started that trend.”

Read more here.—AF

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Texas-based, conservative-branded cellular carrier Patriot Mobile has lost a trove of customer data to hackers, according to TechCrunch.

TechCrunch reported that “a hacker who claimed responsibility for the breach” shared a sample of data stolen from Patriot Mobile. The outlet confirmed that the data was authentic, partly because Patriot’s website has an “apparent bug” that’s leaking some of the same information.”

The leaked data includes full names, email addresses, home zip codes, and the PINs to Patriot Mobile accounts, TechCrunch reported. It’s not clear how many users were affected, but the company has a small subscriber base. The Dallas Morning News reported that as of 2022, Recon Analytics wireless industry consultant Roger Entner estimated the company had under 100,000 customers.

Patriot Mobile didn’t respond to IT Brew’s request for comment by publication. Texas state law requires that any company suffering a data breach affecting 250 or more state residents report the incident to the Texas Attorney General within 30 days.

Keep reading here.—TM

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