Blue Ridge Technology

1 in 4 of us struggles with password overload. Here’s the answer We all know the importance of keeping our businesses safe by making sure our employees understand how to recognize and avoid cyber threats. And most businesses with a digital presence at this point have responded to this reality by instituting some kind of cyber security awareness training. But there are still lots of questions here: what exactly should go into training like this? Why do businesses keep becoming victims in spite of their training policies? And how often should businesses go about it? Why Once a Year Isn’t Enough For many organizations that do cyber security training, the event has become routine, something that happens once a year. Unfortunately, it’s also something that rarely gets talked about outside that once-a-year event. That’s in part why once a year isn’t enough: something that most people find rather uninteresting and that only comes up once every 12 months just isn’t going to take hold. It isn’t...

That long password isn’t keeping you better protected Conventional password wisdom says the longer the password, the better. But that’s only partly true. An unusual new finding from Specops Software is that even 15-character passwords are cracked fairly often: it’s the eighth-most common length of password to be compromised. Here’s what this new research shows, what it means for you, and the steps you can take to keep your business safe. The Findings The company evaluated over 4 billion unique compromised passwords for the study, so it’s pretty safe to trust their findings. Of those 4 billion cracked passwords, 67.7 million were 15 characters or longer. Eight-character passwords are still the most commonly compromised (the company thinks that’s because Active Directory, an older but still active Microsoft product, defaults to eight-character passwords). The Limits of the Findings Before we get too far ahead of ourselves, it’s worth noting that these findings do have some significant l...

AI is making phishing scams more dangerous Have you played around with the latest generation of AI chatbots recently? They’ve been making waves. It started with OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which can answer complex queries and do a surprisingly good job, at least most of the time. Seriously: you can ask it to write a review of your favorite smartphone in the style of a Shakespearean sonnet (or a Shakespearean sonnet in the style of a Wikipedia entry) — and it delivers something awfully close to what you asked for! You can also ask it to write an article like this one. And while this writer certainly hopes the machines aren’t coming for his job quite yet, the results are honestly a little amazing. To be fair, it’s not pro-quality copy. For now it’s more like, let’s say, B-plus-level high-school writing? And there are certainly still some issues with the tech (it can’t really tell what’s true, and it has no qualms making stuff up). Still, this technology (called generative AI) has people — and big ...