It’s hard to believe that it’s been 25 years since 9/11 came to mean only one thing. I saw this morning that 83% of people alive at that time know exactly where they were when it happened; I was on the phone with a colleague at Progressive Insurance. She cut me off and said “my boss just called from O’Hare- something’s going on. Gotta go.” We happened to have tvs on our floor at Progressive HQ so I yelled for somebody to turn them on, and we all watched everything happen. I share it every year at this time, and the Red Bandana story leads this week, as well. Beyond that, there’s the usual security and AI, as well as a (much longer than usual) first person hacking attempt that I dealt with earlier this morning. Enjoy.
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Red Bandana
This one always pops up in my inbox, either on/around 9/11 or when Boston College hosts their “Red Bandana” football game (tonight, as a matter of fact). Always worth sharing.
AI Bioweapons
Plenty of good things have come from the use of AI (for example, the fact that Microsoft is using AI to find significantly more security threats in their products, and putting out patches for those threats), but of course, there are always the people who’ll try to destroy the world… I’ve always said of hackers that many of them seem to be pretty intelligent. Why don’t they just go cure cancer instead?
In the case of AI, Anthropic has just released their annual Threat Report which goes into great detail about five different cases of people working to create bioweapons through use of AI. Fortunately, these were caught and stopped (but it makes you wonder what didn’t get caught).
Who's Listening?
In addition to unveiling a new iPhone earlier this week, Apple announced new solutions that lets your watch listen to absolutely everything you say and do. Just what I want. (As an aside, I had an intro meeting with a local manufacturer of a consumer product earlier this week. While I know the product, I’ve never used it. I mentioned the meeting to Laura here in the office, and since then, we’ve both had said product appear in our various social media feeds. But no, our devices don’t listen to us.)
Anyhow, your Apple watch can now alert you to crying babies and sirens, record conversations, play them back, and summarize them. And of course Apple tells us data is encrypted and not saved. Yep. Mmm hmm.
Requests for Proposals
This week alone, we’ve received three requests for proposals (RFPs) here at Ashton. One came from somebody seeking a migration to Microsoft 365 for their email solution, and was submitted on our website. I emailed the sender and almost immediately, my email got kicked back as undeliverable. So, I called the guy, and he confirmed for me that the request was legit and that autofill had given me the wrong email to which to respond.
Travis received the other two RFPs (both then forwarded my way); one for a local senior living facility and the second for a pavement striping company from Charleston, SC. Unlike the one I received which was very specific, the two Travis received had varying degrees of legitimacy in terms of contact info, and .pdfs which provided no specifics as to the nature of the RFP. Instead, both provided links for details. And in hovering over the links, it was clear that both were scams.
Seems like RFPs might be the new scam du jour. If your business receives/accepts RFPs for your work, let your teams know to be on the lookout.
Click Fix
Long story ahead; I need to open a claim for my mom for long term care (assisted living), and as I have power of attorney, the insurance company (who I called, not vice versa) gave me a URL to upload info and initiate the process. This was during a phone call as I was driving on Wednesday, and I was trying to make notes, talk, and drive. I got to the office this morning and went to the URL that I’d been given, which ended with LPC (or so I thought, and which I’d asked to be repeated).
Upon entering the (seemingly) proper URL, I was redirected to another site at which point I had a pop up from Cloudflare, asking me to verify that I was human. I’m sure you’ve seen those before, and I actually had another website this morning ask me to do the same.
In this case, I checked the box and then got another popup showing three additional steps I’d need to take; the first was to hit the Windows key and letter R are on my keyboard, which gave me a Powershell prompt (this was slightly concerning, as I know that Powershell commands are often used by hackers). I was then asked to type another two key combination, and then hit “enter”. By this point I was a little concerned, but thinking that “I called them, and they confirmed the URL”. Something was happening on the webpage, but it was taking time. So I opened another tab and typed in the same URL, which took me to a completely different “prove you’re human” process. That’s when I really started to worry.
I know we have Sophos security solutions on every endpoint, and felt good that anything I’d done would be stopped/blocked, but you still never know. I wandered down to Travis’ office, but he was on the phone. A few minutes later though, engineer Jeff poked his head in my office and said “what did you click on?” Sure enough, I (un)knowingly executed a powershell command and let somebody into the network. And, as I expected, Sophos stopped it, but not before alarms went off both here and in Sophos’ security operations center. Sophos created a ticket, and our system created a ticket, and as Travis tells it, the engineers all looked at one another and said, “Yep. Abbott.”
If you’ve gotten this far, congratulations. It wasn’t another hour before Travis sent me an article (published this morning) about ClickFix attackers (what I was fooled by) who are preying on people who have become desensitized to the “ridiculous and burdensome” security hoops that we must jump through. At least I’m not the only sucker…
Public Bathrooms
Before coming to Ashton to be our marketing expert, Nancy spent 30 years in the interior design world. First as a commercial designer, and then selling stone and tile to designers and their clients. So, I notice things like tile, stone, wallpaper, and ceiling designs more than the average person does. As a matter of fact, I have two pics on my phone from our recent Montana trip- one of the wallpaper in the mens room of a restaurant at a Big Sky ranch, and the other of the Playboy magazine covers papering the walls of a mens room bar in Livingston.
So, this piece about the guy who’s building a database of 3D images of public restrooms from around the country (153 and counting) jumped out at me, and I figured Nancy might appreciate it…
That’s all for this week. Considering that college football started last week, I’ll assume that you missed the World Nomadic Games… here are some images for you.
If you prefer to stick with football, the game of the year (so far) happens this weekend. No, not the Browns! The Buckeyes travel to Texas tomorrow night and I can’t wait!
Have a great weekend, and Go Bucks!
Abbey