Free Valentine's Day cybersecurity cards: Keep your love secure!
They say love is blind. For the thousands of people who fall for romance scams around Valentine's Day each year, there is some truth to it. But what is a romance scam, and how do you know if you or someone you know is being duped?
A romance scam involves fraudsters who contact targets online, pretending to be looking for love. They’ll often pour on the charm to quickly trick you into getting emotionally involved. Then the requests start coming in. The scammer may pretend to be in financial trouble and ask you to send money, especially gift cards. They may encourage you to take out loans and max out credit cards to “help them out.”
Other times, romance scammers may be more direct and try old-fashioned blackmail. They may ask you to send intimate photos or videos. If you do, they'll then threaten to send them to your friends, family or coworkers — unless you pay.
How to spot romance scams
Although romance scams spike around Valentine’s Day, they can occur throughout the year.
If you find yourself looking for love online, it's important stay stay cyber safe.
- Proceed with caution when connecting with someone always "out of town" or from abroad. These fronts can often serve as the perfect excuse for scammers to justify their distanced requests or strange forms of payment like gift cards.
- Be wary of anyone who makes excuses on why they can't video call or meet you in person. If a few months have passed, and you still haven’t met in person, you have good reason to be suspicious.
- Take a pause if the relationship is moving very fast, and they claim they need money. Scammers will often work to quickly gain your trust before they make the ask for money or gifts.
What should you learn next?
Free Valentine's Day cybersecurity cards
We want you all to be safe, but we also want to do our part to help spread the love (and cybersecurity awareness) this Valentine’s Day. Here are a series of infosec-inspired cards you can download. Send them to your favorite cyber-sweetheart to tell them how you feel!
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In this Series
- Free Valentine's Day cybersecurity cards: Keep your love secure!
- How to design effective cybersecurity policies
- What is attack surface management and how it makes the enterprise more secure
- Is a cybersecurity boot camp worth it?
- The aftermath: An analysis of recent security breaches
- Understanding cybersecurity breaches: Types, common causes and potential risks
- Breaking the Silo: Integrating Email Security with XDR
- What is Security Service Edge (SSE)?
- Cybersecurity in Biden’s era
- Password security: Using Active Directory password policy
- Inside a DDoS attack against a bank: What happened and how it was stopped
- Inside Capital One’s game-changing breach: What happened and key lessons
- A DevSecOps process for ransomware prevention
- What is Digital Risk Protection (DRP)?
- How to choose and harden your VPN: Best practices from NSA & CISA
- Will immersive technology evolve or solve cybercrime?
- Twitch and YouTube abuse: How to stop online harassment
- Can your personality indicate how you’ll react to a cyberthreat?
- The 5 biggest cryptocurrency heists of all time
- Pay GDPR? No thanks, we’d rather pay cybercriminals
- Customer data protection: A comprehensive cybersecurity guide for companies
- Online certification opportunities: 4 vendors who offer online certification exams [updated 2021]
- FLoC delayed: what does this mean for security and privacy?
- Stolen company credentials used within hours, study says
- Don’t use CAPTCHA? Here are 9 CAPTCHA alternatives
- 10 ways to build a cybersecurity team that sticks
- Verizon DBIR 2021 summary: 7 things you should know
- 2021 cybersecurity executive order: Everything you need to know
- Kali Linux: Top 5 tools for stress testing
- Android security: 7 tips and tricks to secure you and your workforce [updated 2021]
- Mobile emulator farms: What are they and how they work
- 3 tracking technologies and their impact on privacy
- In-game currency & money laundering schemes: Fortnite, World of Warcraft & more
- Quantitative risk analysis [updated 2021]
- Understanding DNS sinkholes - A weapon against malware [updated 2021]
- Python for network penetration testing: An overview
- Python for exploit development: Common vulnerabilities and exploits
- Python for exploit development: All about buffer overflows
- Python language basics: understanding exception handling
- Python for pentesting: Programming, exploits and attacks
- Increasing security by hardening the CI/CD build infrastructure
- Pros and cons of public vs internal container image repositories
- CI/CD container security considerations
- Vulnerability scanning inside and outside the container
- How Docker primitives secure container environments
- Top 4 Zapier security risks
- Common container misconfigurations and how to prevent them
- Building container images using Dockerfile best practices
- Securing containers using Docker isolation
- Introduction to container security
- Top 8 Microsoft Teams security issues
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