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Social Engineering

Rapportive adds social intelligence to GMAIL for free

technologyEdward Kiledjian

Rapportive (link) is a free Firefox, Safari and Chrome add-on that brings social intelligence to GMAIL. For every email sender, it displays a picture, a brief bio,  location and links to that their social networks. 

Yes it does work with Google Apps accounts.

It replaces the (less useful) GMAIL advertisements with its own information. Another company called Xobni has a similar tool for Outlook. Installation took only a couple of minutes and then it automatically performs its magic anytime you use the GMAIL web interface. 

There is some debate about where the service get's it's information from. Some have claimed it comes from a service called Rapleaf, others claim it is an in-house culling service. All we know is that the company provides this blurb:

"We combine information from several sources; at the moment, these are Academia.edu, AngelList, Bitbucket, CrunchBase, Econsultancy, Facebook, Flickr, GitHub, Google Profiles, Gravatar, LinkedIn, Plancast, Posterous, Stack Overflow, Tungle.me, Twitter and Vimeo, as well as thousands of organisations' public websites. " (link)

In my testing, some contacts come jam packed with useful information and others get wrong or missing info. Overall I think this is a great way to gleam additional  information which can make the difference between winning or losing. 

Give it a try. It's free

Scammer want your password. Here's how to protect it

InfoSecEdward Kiledjian
As a business leader working in the information security field, I usually add extra doses of "question everything", "trust no one" and "double check everything" into my life. As the holiday season approaches, everyone seem happier, more cheerful and sometimes more trusting.
Scammers are out in force trying to steal your information and identity so this post is a little reminder to be extra vigilant this holiday season. One tip is to
never ever ever ever ever share your password with anyone.
Understand that the "bad people" out there are experts at social engineering. Social engineering is the art of using social and psychological tricks to convince someone to hand over valuable information [that they normally wouldn't]. The minute you let your guard down, you are susceptible to being duped. Your bank or service provider should never ask for your password. 
Make sure when someone claims to be from XYZ company, they actually are. Never give personal information unless you can verify someone's identify or the are able to verify the validity of their claims.
If you receive a call from "the bank" asking for personal info stop and question everything? Ask for their identification and call back details. Call your branch to vaidate the provided information. Only after conducting your due dilligence should you even consider providing your info and then only the bare minimum. Remember that elements like CalledID can be faked.