I was walking through a store in Russell yesterday, and they had a sign by their gift cards that basically said, "Do you know who you are buying this for?". The goal was to prevent people from buying a gift card that was connected to a scam. This got me thinking. Do sales giants, big box store, you know the type I mean without listing any names, actually count on scammers to get paid in gift cards? According to statista.com, Gift card sales were 215 billion dollars in 2023. So this is not a small number. Has anyone heard of any sales giant putting in preventative measures or alerting people that gift cards are a tool used by scammers, or do they actually care? So long as you are spending the money at their store, they don't care how the money was obtained?

AI seems like a great tool, and it is, but how much information are we giving away? In our podcast, we talked about one scenario where a business employee was uploading documents to AI to do their work. These documents contained sensitive information, and that information was then being shared with a third party without consent. There are so many different variations of this problem. Ultimately, our information is stored on someone else's servers, which can then be sold or leveraged by another party. QUESTION: Do we actually understand what we are doing with AI, or are we creating security holes without realizing it? How do you use AI?

Our upcoming podcast is focused on the information that a thief can gather from your Out of Office Reply. One of the biggest targets with this information tends to be admin assistants, secretaries, or interns. The scammer learns that the boss is gone to a conference and then uses the information learned to pretend to be the boss and extract a financial reward. So, a couple of questions for this morning. 1. How much information do you think is in an out-of-office reply? 2. How do you think that information would be used against you? 3. Do you use an out-of-office reply?

One of the most significant aspects of any scam, hack, theft, or similar incident is social engineering. If we can train you to understand what it is, recognize it, and prevent it before it even begins, you can stop it before it causes harm. The question here is, what do you know about Social Engineering? If you have never heard about it, here is a quick video about it. We believe this is such a core to our understanding that we have created a course on it that you can grab in our classroom tab above.

Welcome to our Learn Online Security community. We are here to learn from each other and teach tools that will further protect each other both online and offline. You are one of the founding members of this community, and we applaud you for taking the following steps. As such, we have slashed the prices on all our courses in the classroom for you! How can you get the most out of this community? 1. Add a comment to this post and introduce yourself, and let us know a question that you have about your security. 2. Invite a friend :) Communities are more fun with friends, so invite one friend (or ten) to join you here. 3. Engage in conversations and understand that this is a place of learning, hearing new ideas, and focusing on personal security. Thanks for being so awesome, and I'm excited to meet you :)