Archive for June 29, 2021

New LinkedIn Data Shows Where Canadians Are Moving & Which Industries Are Hiring

Posted in Commentary with tags on June 29, 2021 by itnerd

After a year of working remotely, more Canadians are moving to Vancouver and Halifax for jobs in popular industries and a change in post-pandemic lifestyle, according to LinkedIn’s first-ever Workforce Report for Canada. 

The report measured internal migration trends of major Canadian cities and the growth or decline of hiring in different industries.

  • The National Hiring Rate in Canada last month was up 124% from where it sat in May 2020 at the height of the pandemic
  • Health care, software, and real estate industries were among the biggest gainers, with hiring in the health care space rising 123% from May 2020, and hiring in the entertainment, energy and mining, and recreation and travel industries trending down.
  • The inflow-outflow ratio of residents in Vancouver has seen a 10.5% rise since April 2020, with Halifax seeing a 39% growth surge over the same period.

The full report findings can be found here.

Methodology

An internal migration instance is defined as a member changing their location within the same country on their LinkedIn profile. The index of internal migration is calculated as the share of LinkedIn members who moved within the country divided by its average for 2019. For each city, we also calculate the inflow-outflow ratio (number of inflows to a city for every outflow). Cities are then ranked by the change in their inflow-outflow ratio between April 2019 and March 2020 (before Covid) and between April 2020 and May 2021 (after Covid). 

The hiring rate is the percentage of LinkedIn members who added a new employer to their profile in the same month the new job began, divided by the total number of LinkedIn members in Canada. This number is indexed to the average month in 2016; for instance, an index of 1.05 indicates a hiring rate that is 5% higher than the average month in 2016.

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Guest Post: Atlas VPN Reveals The Top Cybercrime Statistics For 2021 H1

Posted in Commentary with tags on June 29, 2021 by itnerd

The Atlas VPN research team compiled the most significant 2021 H1 cybercrime statistics to provide a precise view of the current cyber-threat landscape.

Based on the statistics, it is evident that both the volume and the sophistication of attacks grew substantially during the period under review.

The shift to remote work is largely to blame, as it provided a considerably larger attack surface for hackers to exploit. Also, unpatched personal devices, unprotected home networks, and reduced visibility for the in-house security team are some of the leading security issues.

Methodology: 

The statistics are based on data from strictly reputable sources, such as the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Federal Trade Commission, Kaspersky, Malwarebytes, and many others. You can click on the source of each statistic to explore the full report that includes extended analysis, references, and additional data. 

Some of the main highlights include:

  • Blockchain hackers netted over $100 million in Q1 2021.
  • Ransomware accounted for 81% of all financially driven intrusions in 2020. The average cost of a ransomware breach was $4.44 million.
  • Phishing assaults affected 83%t of UK firms in the last year. 
  • Google discovered a record-high number of phishing websites last year, with over 2.11 million, representing a 25% increase over 2019.
  • Over 5 billion records have already been leaked in 2021.
  • RDP attacks skyrocketed 241% in 2020. In 2019, the number of RDP attacks was 969 million, but in 2020, threat actors carried out an incredible 3.3 billion attacks.
  • macOS malware development surged by over 1,000% in 2020.

To see the full report, head over to: https://atlasvpn.com/blog/2021-h1-cybercrime-statistics

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LinkedIn Suffers ANOTHER Massive Data Breach… Pretty Much All Their Users Are Affected [UPDATED]

Posted in Commentary with tags , on June 29, 2021 by itnerd

I have some very bad news if you’re a LinkedIn user. Which is pretty much everyone. A data breach involving 700 million users, which is more than 92% of the total 756 million users has occurred. The database is for sale on the dark web, with records including phone numbers, physical addresses, geolocation data, and inferred salaries. No passwords are included, but this is still valuable data that can be used for identity theft and convincing-looking phishing attempts that can themselves be used to obtain login credentials for LinkedIn and other sites.

Yikes!

The way the hacker got in is similar to a breach back in April that had the data of 500 million users stolen. Clearly LinkedIn doesn’t learn from its mistakes. Thus I would urge the relevant authorities to take a look at these incidents and punish LinkedIn (and their owners Microsoft) severely as this is not acceptable. In the meantime, LinkedIn users should be on the lookout for attacks and identity theft attempts, because you know that they are inbound.

UPDATE: Privacy Shark has additional details on this along with a statement from LinkedIn:

We reached out to LinkedIn for verification and received this official statement from Leonna Spilman:

“While we’re still investigating this issue, our initial analysis indicates that the dataset includes information scraped from LinkedIn as well as information obtained from other sources. This was not a LinkedIn data breach and our investigation has determined that no private LinkedIn member data was exposed. Scraping data from LinkedIn is a violation of our Terms of Service and we are constantly working to ensure our members’ privacy is protected.”

I’m sorry…. BUT HOW THE HELL ISN’T THIS A DATA BREACH?

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