Security

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    Financial Stress and Mental Health – Why Younger Employees Leave

    ByMike McBride Reading Time: 4 minutes

    I think this is interesting in a couple of different ways. Clearly, workers are putting a much higher value on their own mental health, and companies that don’t get that, and support it, are going to end up having quite a bit of turnover.

    But, the other thing that I wanted to think more about was what those specific reasons say about the mental health of Millennial and Gen Z workers. They seem to be dealing with a lot of stress around finances, and having that stress impact their mental health. Is that new? Or is it more likely that Gen X and Boomers have had those same stresses, but didn’t really identify them as mental health issues, like anxiety.

    I think there’s something to that. Not to start talking about how things were “back in my day”, but I don’t recall anyone talking about anxiety in the same way we talk about it now. I suspect that many of us had anxiety around finances, we just didn’t call it that, and our solution to that anxiety was, of course, to work harder and longer.

    And guess what? The next generations watched us do that, especially the Baby Boomers, and realized that it doesn’t actually work. Our mental health has sucked, for years, and we just didn’t admit it. They are willing to talk about it, and look for work that fits with lessening stress, especially stress that is related to finances.

    Now, you would think that if they had more stress around finances, they would also just “work harder and longer”, but that assumes that the relationship between employers and employees is the same as it was 25-30 years ago, and it’s just not. Companies come and go now overnight. They run out to hire when things are growing, and rush to fire when things are not growing. Whole industries barely exist anymore. None of us live in the same work world that we grew up in any more.

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    Linked: The Cybersecurity War is Here, and Everyone is a Combatant

    ByMike McBride Reading Time: 2 minutes

    I have said before that I think the biggest reason that customers and “regular” people don’t straight up demand businesses get better at security and privacy is that they don’t really understand it. This is closely followed by the fact that “regular people” aren’t necessarily damaged by these data leaks or anything else all that…

  • What I am Sharing (weekly) Sept. 20, 2020

    ByMike McBride Reading Time: 1 minute

    Five Strategies Building Relationships Remotely

    Software Updates and Why They’re Important

    Legal advice is often unaffordable. Here’s how more people can get help

    This security awareness training email is actually a phishing scam

    “A creative phishing campaign uses an email template that pretends to be a reminder to complete security awareness training from a well-known security company.”

    No Internal Investigation Is Complete Without ESI

    Observations from the Annual ILTA Conference:

    Ransomware Increases by 715% in First Half of 2020

    E-Discovery Platform RelativityOne Gets Its Next-Generation Interface, Aero UI

    Internet Access Has Never Been More Important — and Unequal

    What is mental health first aid? Why every workplace should offer it

    5 TED Talks That Will Make You Better at Remote Work

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    Linked: Hackers are exploiting a critical flaw affecting >350,000 WordPress sites

    ByMike McBride Reading Time: 1 minute

    If you use this plugin, or really any plugin, keep ’em up to date! “Hackers are actively exploiting a vulnerability that allows them to execute commands and malicious scripts on Websites running File Manager, a WordPress plugin with more than 700,000 active installations, researchers said on Tuesday. Word of the attacks came a few hours…

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    Linked: SANS Suffers Data Breach After Phishing Attack

    ByMike McBride Reading Time: 1 minute

    My initial reaction to the headline was “Great, what chance do the rest of us have of not getting hacked if SANS can get hacked?” But, like Sharon, I think this is really great: “This is the part I really like. To make this an educational opportunity, SANS says that it will host a webcast…

  • Twitter Hackers Were Smart, But Hardly Genius

    ByMike McBride Reading Time: 2 minutes

    Smart enough to get in, not smart enough to cover their tracks when getting paid. That doesn’t seem so smart. Which goes to show, that security around Twitter could have been a lot better, and people who work there maybe should have been a little less careless. That doesn’t bode well for the rest of us when even a big tech company can’t get this right. How many of us have people on staff who might fall for this kind of phone-based attack?

    What should we think of the complicated, super-smart hackers who also manage to be so easily identifiable? Should we accept that the hardest thing about any conspiracy, and this goes for all the conspiracy theories out there, is making sure one person doesn’t do something stupid and give it all away? That. actually, is nearly impossible, and is the one thing that makes most theories unbelievable to me. This hack proves to be a perfect example.