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Ransomware gangs skip the CEO, head straight for the 40-something IT manager
- theseanz 2mo agoHey! As a 46 year old I am offended by this - I am definitely not Gen X. We’re a weird X/Millenial hybrid I’ve seen referred to as Xennials. Also F ZScaler - we use this officially sanctioned MTM attack at work and all it does is make my job harder.
- SoftTalker 2mo agoPeople on the borderlines often are overlooked. I'm an old GenX, a few years too young to be a Boomer, and even the younger Boomers grew up with a quite different experience than the mainline Boomer generation. And I was already an adult and married by the main part of the GenX era.
- ourmandave 2mo agoDividing generations across decades might work for marketing to them in general, but it's otherwise about as useful as horoscopes and the BMI scale.
- saalweachter 2mo agoDuodecades are superior to decades, and we can take overlapping pairs of duodecades as "generations" to solve the dividing line problem. Duodecades: * 1968-1980 * 1980-1992 * 1992-2004 * 2004-2016 * 2016-2028 Overlapping generations: * GenX: 1968-1992 * Millennial: 1980-2004 * GenZ: 1992-2016
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- hdgvhicv 2mo agoPrecise boundaries are clearly problematic but you can’t claim that someone born in the late 60s had the same type of global view that someone born in the late 80s did.
- fryanyway_swe 2mo agoThe BMI scale is useful. Yes, athletes and bodybuilders it may not be accurate for, but being on HN I think you are neither :) Currently, I am at 20 BMI, for reference.
- lubujackson 2mo agoI feel like looking at a photo to judge how fat they are is probably equally effective tbh. It is a rule of thumb at best.
- aaronbrethorst 2mo agoYou might be Generation Jones: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_Jones https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_Jones
- SoftTalker 2mo agoI'm slightly younger than that, but certainly shared parts of their experiences. Closer to Jones than Boomer for sure. And my father was too young for WWII and too old for Vietnam so I have no direct ties to either of those experiences.
- zetsurin 2mo agoyou were born in 1980 you are gen x https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_X https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_X by definition.
- QuantumNomad_ 2mo agoBut also: > Xennials, also called Xillenials, are a social cohort encompassing people born on the cusp of or during the later years of Generation X and the early years of the Millennials generation. > Many researchers and popular media use birth years from 1977 to 1983, though some extend this further in either direction. Xennials are described as having had an analog childhood and a digital young adulthood. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xennials https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xennials
- hdgvhicv 2mo agoDepends a lot on your background. I was online in 1994 as a kid, but my peers weren’t until nearer 1999. Same age. We all got mobile phones when we went to university in sep 2000
- xeromal 2mo agoYeah, I grew up in N. GA in a rural area and my family still had a rotary until the mid or late 90s. lol. No internet either
- radarsat1 2mo ago> Xennials are described as having had an analog childhood and a digital young adulthood. Pretty bang on description actually. As a 46 yo, sometimes I can't believe I have actual memories of using a rotary phone, or when my family first got a microwave or even VHS recorder. Yet I do. Feels like eons ago.
- anon48293 2mo agoI’m quite a bit younger and have the same experience. I feel blessed for this actually. It’s like I lived 3 generations at once.
- croisillon 2mo agongl as a 45 y.o. Gen Y i was not so surprised to read what stupid things 46 y.o. Gen X do
- rf15 2mo agoImpressive how many people posting here love the gen [XYZ] categories and feel offended when they are not put in the correctly labeled drawer. ...Shouldn't we move on from this and obsess about something more fun?
- cannonpr 2mo agoThe label unless you grew up in the Anglo sphere is also especially meaningless, yet certain people insist in labelling the rest of us :) I got to enjoy Phreaking well into the era most others already had ADSL…
- j45 2mo agoI believe the term is xennial: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xennials https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xennials Rare and intersectionally have an unfair advantage.
- foco_tubi 2mo agoI am definitely more triggered by the mention of ZScaler than the Gen X scope creep
- mikeocool 2mo agoYeah, by most definitions at least 50% of “40-somethings” are solidly millennial.
- Lucasoato 2mo agoCompanies hope that training will protect them from cyber threats, while ignoring that their most vulnerable employees are the ones that lost the motivation to care about their job.
- calgoo 2mo agoTraining is basically just for legal and insurance reasons... If not there would be no reason to do yearly training of the same bs courses.
- UqWBcuFx6NV4r 2mo agoYes there would. It makes perfect sense to refresh one’s understanding. You’re within your right to be grumpy about doing training, but that’s not the same thing as there not being legitimate intent behind it, let alone it actually being a good idea overall. Not everything on earth is catered to you specifically.
- neilv 2mo ago> Zscaler says they combine information from compromised systems with publicly available data to map reporting lines and identify the employees most likely to influence a company's response. And commercially-available data: enterprise salespeople, for example, can buy this intel from data brokers (directly, or with layered services catering to sales funnels specifically). It's another way that surveillance capitalism can be a national security threat against the US. You have countless US companies collectively mapping out people networks and assembling often intimate dossiers on individuals... and saving international organized crime and geopolitical adversaries a ton of work, which they might not have the resources to otherwise do.
- SoftTalker 2mo agoThey've learned from how real businesses operate. Ever talked to a salesperson? Notice how much the initial conversation is geared to trying to figure out whether you have any real purchasing authority, and who does if it isn't you?
- selestify 2mo agoI have never talked to sales. How do they find this out smoothly, without insulting the person being talked to for not having any actual authority?
- SoftTalker 2mo agoThey pretty much just ask. "If there's an opportunity here, who makes the decision?" And they'll want to know if there's a technical decision maker and a financial one.
- anon48293 2mo agoThey ask something along the lines of “What does the process look like on your end” to figure out who makes the technical, legal, executive and financial decisions. Because often in larger companies you got approval, then you go testing and the users approve as well, and suddenly either legal, finance or your manager pulls back. So they want these people in the loop and signing off as early or quickly as possible, to avoid wasting their time. That’s also why the sales people usually state how important it is to have clear small and measurable goals. It’s not only for you to figure out if the solution works, but to have you set up small and clear internal criteria to sign off on as quickly as possible.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- stephbook 2mo agoThe article is unclear: Do they "attack" the GenX managers and encrypt their stuff, or do they simply contact GenX managers in order to get paid faster? In that case, the managers aren't "victims" and aren't "attacked", that would be the company..
- freehorse 2mo agoIf the article was written by an actual human, we may have had the answer. Instead, we got this non-sense > By the time the ransom note lands, the crooks may already know who approves invoices, who signs contracts, who runs HR, and who reports to whom. The encryption is just the bit that victims notice.
- burnte 2mo agoI'm unclear what part of that sentence you didn't like, it was quite well formed. It's pointing out that the attackers do homework in advance and understand the victim company they target. It's illustrating the asymmetric information aspect of the attack, it's targeted with a lot of pre-work rather than a random victim.
- anon48293 2mo ago“By the time … lands” “The crooks…” ”… is just the bit…” LLM tells.
- burnte 2mo agoBut LLMs talk like that because people talk like that. The Register regularly uses the work "crooks".
- freehorse 2mo agoBecause this sentence is "well formed" but meaningless. Most of the things mentioned is not sensitive or even private data for a company, and some (eg "who runs HR") are probably available in the public internet. Most is findable/guessable even without data from breaches. The breaching/encryption part is not what people "notice", it is the whole point of the whole operation, and without it the rest is not a threat. You cannot contrast finding publicly available info in the internet with losing access to data. And it still did not answer if this info is used in the attacks or for contacting for the ransom, as the article mixes these 2 all the time. The whole article is a mess, and it is not because I am GenX (I am not) or sth.
- tedggh 2mo ago[dead]