Here are some tips, secrets of professional hackers

I probably sound like a broken record when I say to be careful of scammers who are pretending to be authorities.

Or to beware if an email or a phone call has information that seems too good to be true or has a sense of urgency to help someone in a serious bind.

We all know there are scammers around the world whose full-time job is to “catch” people who will answer that email or tell the person on the phone some information to unlock access to their bank account. And the sad part is, there are still people every day who get caught by such scams, which are getting more sophisticated.

But there are a lot of less subtle scams and campaigns being perpetrated every day.

Every year, my parent company requires all employees to take various trainings, including one on cyber security.

This year, several of my colleagues and I commented that the training was a really good one. (Come on, those of you who have to go through human resources trainings know they are often not the first thing on your list of things you are excited about).

The training we took this year was by security experts and professional included hackers sharing their secrets on the tools of the trade and how our knowledge of these tactics can protect us and our company.

Many of the things I’ve heard before or shared with readers. But some of them were new or updated scams that I didn’t know.

All of this information is helpful for all consumers to have in their everyday digital life, in addition to workers protecting their company’s systems.

In fact, in a text exchange with two colleagues after the training, I told them the training scared me at times with some of the things we could be targeted for and I joked whether they were really my friends and colleagues or had they made up their identities to try to earn my trust to scam me?

Social Engineering

What I jokingly described above is an example of social engineering. It’s a real thing.

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