Technology Tips: October 2026 Edition

Tech Tips October 2026

October brings many things: crisp air, Halloween fun, and Cybersecurity Awareness Month! This edition of Tech Tips is filled to the brim with harrowing hacker facts that just might make your skin crawl!
 

Identity theft 👮

The FTC had 1,358,253 complaints of identity theft in 2025, which was 19.6% more than the year before. Here was the rank of the complaints:

• Credit card fraud (597,770)
• Other identity theft (443,118)
• Loan or lease (210,030)
• Bank account (114,244)
• Employment or tax-related (81,889)
• Phone or utilities (79,476)
• Government documents or benefits (65,720)

To keep yourself safe, consider freezing your credit until you need to apply for a loan or credit card. If your credit is frozen, it will prevent hackers from potentially opening a loan in your name. Place a fraud alert on your credit report and consider using a VPN when using public networks.
 

Know what lurks in the cyber shadows 👤

Hackers attack in more ways than you’d think. Here are five attacks that you may not have heard of.

• Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Attack: an attacker overwhelms a target server with traffic to disrupt it.
• Watering Hole Attack: a targeted cyberattack where the bad actors compromise a website that is frequently visited by their victims.
• SQL Injection: cyber criminals exploit HTML from a SQL database to create queries that can create, delete, or modify data.
• Whaling: targeted spear phishing attacks towards c-suite executives.
• Zero-day Exploit: hackers will take advantage of a bad situation and make it worse.

Spooky stats 👻

Here are a few cybersecurity stats that are downright spooky.

• The 2025 cost of global cybercrime - $10.5 trillion
• Time to identify and contain a breach – 247 days
• Average data breach cost - $4.99 million
• Ransomware appears in 48% of breaches

Malware of the month

The group chat has been leaked…and hackers spilled the beans that they stole $206.95 million in six months without encrypting any data.

The median payment was $6 million while individual amounts ranged from $100,000 to $30 million.