Beware! Your Vehicle Can Be a Silent Witness

Modern vehicles come with a lot of 'gizmos' intended to make the driving experience pleasurable. With these, is also the fact that data are being collected and stored about you, your driving habits and the places you visit.

This data mine could be used to determine your culpability under investigation and this article brings your awareness to this.

Protect your WhatsApp Account

For many, WhatsApp has become an indispensable means of daily communication. Threat actors are exploiting this popular app for their nefarious activities.

Cyber criminals are on the prowl, hacking into WhatsApp accounts and group chats to defraud and cause other harms. While it is true that your safety is your personal responsibility, you are also responsible for the safety of members of any WhatsApp group chat that you belong to. Afterall, you are either your brother's keeper or killer!

A lot can happen to you if you, ranging from financial loss to an actual loss of life if you don't take the necessary actions to safeguard your WhatsApp account. Your account may also become the initial access point through which groups you belong to can be compromised.

Recently, a group was hacked through the negligence of a member to protect his account. The hacker was able to compromise and take over the WhatsApp account of about 10% of the members. Included in the account taken over was that of an individual who uses the account to sell financial products. The hacker used the account, acting as the owner, to deceive a few clients to transferring funds to him thus defrauding them. In a similar case, using social engineering, an individual's bank account was compromised and he was defrauded of huge amounts of money.

So, now that you are aware of the risks, what can you do? You need to take the following steps to harden your account so that you can keep enjoying the services of WhatsApp without the risks:

1. Do NOT connect to public free wifi unless using a VPN

2. Use strong passwords to protect your accounts

3. Enable two-step verification

4. Look for suspicious access and logout from any.

5. Change settings regarding automatically connecting to groups

6. Limit who can contact you by blocking accounts you don’t want to relate with

7. Report all hacks to a threat database so that others can be aware

8. Finally, be aware of how WhatsApp responds to law enforcements.

For comments and guidance on being safe in cyberspace, please click here

Your password....your online safety

Passwords, those arbitrary string of characters are commonplace. But, have you stopped to consider how safe your passwords are? The very first step in being cyber safe is to maintain healthy password etiquette.

In this publication, our Cyber Capability Education and Training team draws our attention to best practices around password security.

Phishing

Information is the new oil and many threat actors out there will do all that is possible to gain access to privileged information.

One of the social engineering methods through which this can be achieved is phishing.