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A lot can happen in 20 years. Yet in the same amount of time, while things change, some things don't. Life is funny that way.

 

So we wanted to look at information security through the lens of time: twenty years ago, a group of seven hackers from the east coast, referring to themselves as L0pht (pronounced "loft) testified before Congress about the massive security flaws the internet faced. In 1998. 

That should have been good news, but as one of the members recently told Decipher: “We didn’t learn our lessons. We made the same mistakes with mainframes, then client-server, then desktops, then mobile, and now IoT.” That we haven't learned from those lessons and fixed this gaping holes is alarming. 

Read more from Decipher.

Only 9% of millennials have any interest in pursuing a career in cybersecurity according to a recent survey. It all boils down to an awareness issue: few millennials know somebody personally who works in the field. Read more from Tech Republic.

In other news, Google is working to incorporate an updated form of its autocomplete software into the Gmail suite to help predict the language you would use when writing an email. Read more about that from Tech Crunch.

We recently got an email from somebody asking if the email in the screenshot above was legitimate. And it got us thinking: healthy paranoia is good, but knowledge of phishing attempts is better.

According to Andy Greenberg at Wired, "It's always wise to treat emails with caution...and if you do get a message from potus[at]whitehouse[dot]gov, don't give him your PayPal password." Well, that feeds the paranoia. But there is good news: according to Barkly, there are a few pretty easy ways to see if things aren't what they seem in an email.

Worried about being phished? That's perfectly reasonable. Read more about phishing in general from Wired Magazine, and keep yourself a little more well-armed when browsing your emails.