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The New Attack Surface is Your Life

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The New Attack Surface is Your Life

The Latest in Cyber Attacks

A16Z,

5 min read
3 take-aways
Audio & text

What's inside?

To hack companies, cybercriminals now target individual employees. Protect yourself and your company with simple, effective security measures.

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Editorial Rating

9

Qualities

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Recommendation

To hack companies, cybercriminals now target individual employees. Disguised as friends, colleagues or employees of reputable companies, they send emails requesting money or information that'll help them log into your accounts. Small businesses that spend little to no money on their security are particularly vulnerable. Software engineer and investor Martin Casado from Andreessen Horowitz details how attackers obtain access to organizations and provides practical methods people can use to protect themselves.

Summary

Cybersecurity attackers shift from targeting organizations to attacking individuals.

Institutions invest heavily in security technology and personnel. Microsoft, for example, spends more than $1 billion to protect not only its assets, but the devices it builds as well. Many people believe cybersecurity prevention needs to happen at the level of governments and financial institutions. However, security officers see that cybercriminals increasingly attack through individual users.

Cost and ease of attacks contribute to this change: Developing exploits – code that targets security vulnerabilities – to attack laptops or phones, run from $1 to $2.5 million, but it costs merely $19.99 to...

About the Speaker

Martin Casado is a general partner at the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz where he focuses on enterprise investing. He was previously the co-founder and chief technology officer at network virtualization company Nicira

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