Gabriel Kojima

Romance scams are different from other scams.  They prey on lonely people looking to connect with someone, and can often take months to develop to the point where money changes hands.  The emotional harm to the victim can be even more painful than the monetary loss.  The spread of online dating sites and apps has made this fraud even easier to commit.    Victims in the US and Canada have reported losing nearly $1 billion over the last three years, and BBB estimates there may be more than a million victims in the U.S. alone. Because most people do not file complaints about romance scams with BBB or law enforcement, this may just be the tip of the iceberg.   BBB’s study, “Online Romance Scams: How Scammers Use Impersonation, Blackmail, and Trickery to Steal from Unsuspecting Daters” looks at how these scams work, who the scammers are, and what is being done to combat them. Anatomy of a Romance Scam -  Experts identify several distinct stages of t...

According to the 2018 Scalar Security Study (commissioned by Scalar and conducted independently by IDC Canada),  Canadian organizations are attacked in varying degrees of severity more than 450 times per year, with 87 per cent suffering at least one successful breach.  Almost half (46 per cent) are not confident in their ability to defend against attacks.    “As cybersecurity breaches become the new normal, organizations can’t be complacent.  Many companies are still reporting gaps in their defences despite hiring full-time security staff, which may point to a deficit in the availability of highly skilled IT workers,” said Theo Van Wyk, Chief Security Architect, Scalar Decisions.  “The rising number of high-impact breaches coincides with the increasing costs of recovery.” The study, examining the cybersecurity readiness of Canadian organizations and year-over-year trends in handling and managing growing cyber threats, also found:  (1) Of the c...

A federal grand jury has indicted 13 Russian nationals and three Russian entities for a massive operation intended to interfere with the 2016 US presidential election.  US Special Counsel Robert Mueller has accused the defendants of posing as Americans to sway election results.  The Internet Research Agency, a Russian organization, and the 13 actors reportedly began targeting the United States back in 2014.    Mueller's indictment claims they "had a strategic goal to sow discord in the U.S. political system, including the 2016 U.S. presidential election."   To do this, they launched an operation to support the Trump campaign and denigrate Hillary Clinton.  In April 2014 the agency formed a department focused on the US population and operated on social platforms including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube.  By 2014, its strategy included fomenting distrust in US presidential candidates and the US political system. Activity included buying...

The federal government is embarking on a new pilot program that will allow people to cross borders faster if they create a digital profile filled with their personal information on their mobile devices.   The  Known Traveller Digital Identity  is a joint venture between the governments of Canada and the Netherlands, and will be tested first on travelers going between those countries.  The plan is to have it ready for a wider global roll out by 2020. The project announcement was made at the Davos World Economic Forum last month  but has mostly flown under the radar.  According to the World Economic Forum document outlining the program, international traveler arrivals are expected to jump from 1.2 billion in 2016 to 1.8 billion by 2030.  This will increase risk and security requirements for the aviation and travel and tourism sectors.  Much like other trusted-traveler programs — such as Nexus, which allows people quicker movement between Cana...

A telephone scam sweeping Calgary and Alberta  has prompted a warning to ignore missed overseas calls. Tony Tighe reports.  The  one-ring scam  is back and is catching a new wave of unsuspecting cellphone owners.  The calls show up on your phone as a missed call and come from overseas locations like Albania, Macedonia or the Seychelles. Ebun Edewole got one while she was sleeping at  2 a.m.  and thought it was a relative from overseas.  She waited until morning to call back, but when she checked again, didn’t recognize the number.  “Ever since then, I get at least one a day, maybe in the morning and then in the evening,” Adewole said.  “I thought maybe my phone number was on a weird website or something or I thought it was a telemarketer.  “It wasn’t until I started looking it up that I thought it might be a scam.” According to the Calgary Better Business Bureau (BBB), it’s called the one-ring scam or the Japanese name “Wan...

About four in 10 young Canadians have sent a sext and more than six in 10 have received one, suggests a new report, which also puts a spotlight on the unauthorized sharing of sexual photographs among teens.  Still, sexting happens less commonly among youth than many people believe - including nearly all of the survey's 800 16- to 20-year-old participants, said Matthew Johnson, director of education for the non-profit organization MediaSmarts.  It's also not an "intrinsically harmful" behaviour, he said, with the majority of sexts remaining private between the sender and intended recipient. "We need to move from fear-mongering to talking about things from an ethical and moral point of view," said Johnson, who called the report one of the first in the world to focus on the non-consensual sharing of intimate images.  "We need to be talking about consent in all contexts, including digital contexts ... and to really send a loud and clear message that thi...

Great short little quiz to test your security awareness courtesy of the Provincial Government: https://bcgov.github.io/SecurityAwareness/February2018Quiz/index.html

Canada's privacy commissioner thinks you should have the right to ask that inaccurate, incomplete or outdated information appearing in search engines be either amended or removed - and that under Canadian law, internet companies should have to comply.  In cases where information about individuals has been posted by others to a website or social media platform, individuals should also have a right to challenge the accuracy and appropriateness of that information. The proposed policy was announced  Friday  by the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada.  Although the proposal is similar in some ways to the European Union's right to be forgotten - which has been criticized for its potential to affect free expression - it isn't modelled on the EU's framework, but rather is  an interpretation of existing Canadian privacy law .  "There is little more precious than our reputation," Privacy Commissioner Daniel Therrien said in a statement announcing the p...