Happy New Year from The McGrail Foundation
Jan 01, 2025
Happy New Year! The McGrail Foundation hopes that your holiday season has been going great!
With the turn of the year from 2024 to 2025, we know a vast amount of people come up with New Year resolutions to work on and complete throughout the year.
We hope that one of your New Year resolutions can be renewed and improved cybersecurity awareness. Every new year presents an opportunity to improve and learn! Unfortunately, bad actors also have resolutions and you can bet they are working on new ways to take advantage of people.
One thing they will use is called Open Source Intelligence or OSINT. This usually means trawling things such as public records and all those social media posts with way too much information in them. They can use this information to create compelling phishing attacks.
Bad actors also like to use geographic location information and then use that information for targeted attacks.
Additional sources of OSINT include:
- Academic papers and published research
- Books and other reference materials
- Telephone directories
- Court filings and Arrest Records
- Public surveys
- Breach or compromise disclosure information
- Out of office messages
- Public records such as land transfers
So make it your 2025 New Year's Resolution to be more conscious about what information you make available to bad actors!
