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Lessons Learned Hiring Software Engineers During a Bubble – Part 3

Now that you've (hopefully!) read my first two blog posts on hiring lessons learned, Step 0: Who Are You? and Step 1: The Prep , you're ready to check out my third - and final - post on the topic: Step 2: The How Finding the Candidates If you ask sales managers what qualities they look for in top performers, they will likely include: tirelessly hunting for prospects and keeping their calendars...
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Lessons Learned Hiring Software Engineers During a Bubble - Part 2

As per my previous blog post, hiring software engineers gets more competitive every year. Now that you’ve read the first step in our process, Step 0: Who Are You , here’s the next step: Step 1: The Prep The Pitch Hiring is a lot like sales, and just like a good salesperson, you need a well-honed pitch. For recruiting purposes, you’ll want to break this into two parts: first, the company pitch and...
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Lessons learned hiring software engineers during a bubble

Hiring software engineers gets more competitive every year. There is now a service - hired.com - that provides an efficient, but disturbingly Tinder-like, interface for evaluating potential candidates. Traditional businesses like banks, healthcare providers and automotive shops are hiring software engineers too. This is creating so much demand that talent is being pulled from other fields. We see...
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Enhance Data Protection By Restoring Trust in the Inbox

When it comes to cyber-resilience, a one size approach does not fit all. The threat level is rising as attacks become more frequent and complex. Cyber criminals use multiple attack vectors to gain the intelligence and access necessary to penetrate a company’s defenses. In particular, sophisticated, targeted email attacks that are aimed at specific employees are one of the most commonly used...
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Phishing Federal Agencies: Why Government Bodies are Prime Targets

With cyber warfare increasingly dominating headlines, the digital security measures of governments have come under growing scrutiny. The US government is one that constantly makes the news for being a prime target for cybercriminals and other nation-states. Recently, it was reported that a hacker accessed an employee’s email account at the Department of Justice and stole 200GB of files including...
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Gmail User? Your Email is About to Get Safer

Your email is about to get safer if you are a Gmail user! This week in the Gmail Blog , Product Manager John Rae-Grant talked about a couple of changes to Gmail on the web that will allow users to see if an email might not be as secure as it should be. First, Gmail will display a broken lock symbol in the upper right of the email window if it is not encrypted in transit with TLS. And second, Gmail...
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What Happens When Your CEO’s Email is Compromised?

What would you do if you received a confidential email from your CEO asking you to wire money to an attorney as part of an acquisition? This is what happened to Texas manufacturing firm, Ameriforge Group Inc., whose director of accounting wired $480,000 to the Agricultural Bank of China, before realizing that it was an email scam. Unfortunately, these kinds of highly targeted phishing scams, known...
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DANE vs DMARC: The Email Authentication Landscape

Lately, the question of DANE vs DMARC has been coming up quite a bit. While both DANE and DMARC involve “authentication”, there are significantly different things meant by each. Let’s start by addressing the underlying technologies. DANE, or RFC6698 , is intended to mitigate the threat of a man-in-the-middle intercepting encrypted communications by posing as one of the end points. A common vector...
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Don’t Let Your Customers Be Fooled By Cousin Domains

In the last five years, we’ve all become far too familiar with it – hackers spoofing a company’s domain and therefore tarnishing the brand, bad actors attempting to infect our computers with malware, and criminals sending millions of spam messages. As if this isn’t enough, now there is a whole group of people working to outsmart companies AND their customers by using cousin domains to fool...
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Email Scams to Avoid this Holiday Season

With the high volume of email activity the holiday season brings, we’ve been getting a lot of questions about holiday email scams – what to look for and how to avoid them. So in the spirit of giving…some good advice…our Field CTO John Wilson has published a blog on LinkedIn with suggestions that can help people better protect themselves from online criminals, and help businesses ensure they aren’t...
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Ansible and Terraform at Agari: An Automation Journey

Snowflakes and Early Automation Efforts At Agari, as part of our mission to solve phishing, we deal with data at scale. We’ve chosen AWS to help us move quickly, making sure our infrastructure is as agile as we are. Unfortunately, in the beginning, we treated AWS instances much the same way as physical servers: each configuration was lovingly hand-crafted, packages were installed at the command...
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Steve Katz, FS-ISAC Chairman: Perspectives on Phishing

Steve Katz - “Phishing and social engineering is still a global threat to every business around today.” Last year, phishing attacks cost organizations $4.5 billion in losses, but as we all know the loss is not only monetary. These attacks exploit the trust we as customers have in the brands we use. Recently Agari sat down with the Financial Services industry's first CISO, previous CSO of Citi...
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Exploring Phishing Statistics

At Agari, we are vocal about the steps organizations can take to protect their brands and customers from the impact of phishing attacks. But what exactly are the hard numbers behind our mission? Let’s look at some phishing statistics showing a clear need for change when it comes to mitigating the phishing problem. A rising threat Verizon research has found that phishing is now the second most...
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Protecting Customers From Phishing At FS-ISAC

A long-time sponsor of FS-ISAC, Agari takes pride in being a member of the digital security community, committed to protecting financial services brands and their customers from email-based cyber attacks. During this year's conference, held at the Hotel del Coronado in San Diego, we once again joined our industry brethren, reconnected with familiar faces and forged new relationships with cyber...
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Phishing Awareness: How to Prevent Phishing

[et_pb_section admin_label="section"][et_pb_row admin_label="row"][et_pb_column type="4_4"][et_pb_text admin_label="Text" background_layout="light" text_orientation="left" use_border_color="off" border_color="#ffffff" border_style="solid"] In the final installment in our series of blogs on the Fundamentals of Phishing we will explore how to prevent phishing attacks. To truly prevent email phishing...
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Email Phishing Examples and How to Spot Them

In the second in our series of blogs on the Fundamentals of Phishing we will explore how to identify fraudulent emails. Not that long ago, phishing attempts were quite primitive and often full of errors, and it was easier for consumers to identify when something was amiss. In addition, consumers weren’t accessing their inboxes from multiple devices and mobiles, nor did they expect to receive...
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Exploring the Ashley Madison Dataset

I first heard about the Ashley Madison breach on July 15, 2015 in a post by Brian Krebs . I immediately wondered what the fallout of such a breach would be. Would Ashley Madison's new tagline be "1 million divorces and counting!" Would the perpetrators try to profit from the stolen data, perhaps through blackmail? I never imagined I'd soon have the chance to explore the dataset myself, after...
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Agari and RiskIQ Join Forces to Share Threat Data to Fight Cyber Criminals

Threat intelligence exchange will benefit Agari and RiskIQ customers through heightened security awareness and the ability to respond to discovered threats SAN MATEO, Calif. — Sept. 15, 2015 — Agari, the leading provider of data-driven security solutions that detect and prevent advanced email cyberthreats, and RiskIQ, the Enterprise Digital Footprint Security company, today announced a strategic...
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Airflow DAG @ Agari

Workflow Schedulers Workflow schedulers are systems that are responsibile for the periodic execution of workflows in a reliable and scalable manner. Workflow schedulers are pervasive - for instance, any company that has a data warehouse, a specialized database typically used for reporting, uses a workflow scheduler to coordinate nightly data loads into the data warehouse. Of more interest to...
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What is 'Zero-Trust'?

With the X-Files soon making a return to the small screen (!!!), I have been thinking a lot lately about the concept of trust. Specifically as it relates to security, and especially the concept of "Zero-Trust". Many security front-runners have begun enacting a new security architecture called Zero-Trust Networking and it really took off when Google decided to implement it . The underlying...