Hats off to ASEE daily alert service:

USA Today (4/1, Acohido) reports “spear-phishing attacks, which often enlist social-media tools to meticulously wedge into corporate networks, are increasingly used in computer thefts that pinpoint valuable corporate data, according to a report released today by IBM’s X-Force cybersecurity team.” Cybercriminals are working through “search engines and social networks to help them target specific employees for social-engineering trickery at a wide range of companies, professional firms and government agencies.” After a successful attack is executed on one company computer, the criminals quietly infiltrate broader portions of a company’s network. The target is often intellectual property, “generally considered twice as valuable as day-to-day financial and customer data, according to Forrester Research.”