Cyber criminals keep coming up with new ways to infiltrate networks and steal data. Here is Forbes.com's list of the top cyber threats to watch for in 2013. Check out the full article here.

"Threat #1: Social Engineering

This begins with focusing on a tried-and-true blackhat tactic in both the physical and digital worlds – social engineering. Before the computer age, this meant sneaking one’s way past a company’s defenses with the gift of gab as opposed to a cleverly-worded email. Now social engineering has moved onto social networks, including Facebook and LinkedIn.

Threat #2: APTs

Being aware of social engineering is important, of course, because it can be the precursor for a sophisticated attack meant to breach the wall of your organization. This year saw a number of high-profile attacks (think: Gauss and Flame) targeting both corporations and governments. These attacks are known as Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs).

Threat #3: Internal Threats

But some of the most dangerous attacks come from the inside. These attacks can be the most devastating, due to the amount of damage a privileged user can do and the data they can access.

Threat #4: BYOD

The issue of trust comes into play in the mobile world as well, with many businesses struggling to come up with the right mix of technologies and policies to hop aboard the bring-your-own-device (BYOD) trend. Users are increasingly using their devices as they would their PCs, and by doing so are opening themselves up to web-based attacks the same as they would if they were operating a desktop computer.

Threat #5: Cloud Security

BYOD is not the only thing changing the walls corporations must build around critical data however. There is also this little trend called cloud computing. With more companies putting more information in public cloud services, those services become juicy targets, and can represent a single point of failure for the enterprise.

Threat #6: HTML5

Just as the adoption of cloud computing has changed the vulnerability surface, so will the adoption of HTML5. Earlier this year, it was noted at the Black Hat conference, a place where security pros can get a sign of attacks to come, that HTML5′s cross-platform support and integration of various technologies opens up new possibilities for attack, such as abusing Web Worker functionality.

Threat #7: Botnets

But even though the arms race between researchers and attackers favors innovation, expect cybercriminals to spend a lot of time perfecting what they know best, such as making sure their botnets have high availability and are distributed.

Threat #8: Precision Targeted Malware

Attackers are also learning from the steps researchers are taking to analyze their malware, and techniques were recently demonstrated that can help render analysis ineffective by designing malware that will fail to execute correctly on any environment other than the one originally targeted."

Technology has come a long way in a very short period of time. There are days when it is hard to imagine a time without smartphones and itunes.

But if you long for the technology of the 80s and 90s (or just the nostalgic sentiment), click here.

This article comes by way of our Tech Manager Michelle Buckley. Interesting statistics on how long we tend to stay in the same job. I think we all have the general sense that gone are the days where you stayed for your entire career at one company. According to this article by Toni Bowers, only 12% of people stay in their jobs for more than 5 years.

Check out the full article here.

Women continue to consistently earn less than men in the workplace, about 20% less according to research. But is the difference solely because of discriminatory hiring processes and work environments? Or because women choose certain professions more than others and those tend to be lower paid?

Two researchers, Matthew Bidwell and Roxana Barbulescu, recently took a closer look.

"What they found, says Barbulescu, an assistant professor at McGill University in Montreal, was surprising. "When women seek to have the same opportunities, there are some barriers that they themselves see, whereas other people -- men, for example -- may not perceive."

Their results, she says, suggest that it's not necessarily the hiring process itself that leads to issues of discrimination, that in fact many legislative changes have had a positive impact on these issues. Instead, she suggests, companies need to be taking a larger look at what's happening and see what else about their companies may be keeping women from applying.

What are the workplace cultures in place? What is the culture like? How do women perceive the organization and do they see themselves fitting into the company?

These results, says Alan Johnson, managing director of Johnson Associates, a New York-based compensation consulting firm that caters to Wall Street and investment-banking firms, are "actually quite consistent" with other academic studies done in the past.

"The majors that people choose or the lifestyle choices that people make, economically, for a long time have been found to be huge factors in the differences of pay," he says. "I think the difference for society is that that doesn't feel fair, necessarily, but it is kind of the economic outcome."

At an individual level, however, there's not a lot that can be done to remedy the inequities on a broad scale, other than to have individuals become aware that the choices they make -- in terms of where they go to school, what majors they pursue, and what types of occupations and industries they are drawn -- to will have an impact on their overall earning power, he says.

Employers, though, can and should be taking steps to both ensure that their pay is equitable internally and that they are taking steps to recruit, attract and retain employees not only regardless of gender, but regardless of sexual orientation, veteran status and other protected classes."

Check out the full article here.

For those of us that send out newsletters and communications on a regular basis to our clients and colleagues, we often wonder what the best time of the week or the day is to send out an email and if good timing increases your chances of it being read. So this article caught my attention.

Earlier this year, content marketer Linda Formacelli called B.S. on all the e-mail experts who claim there's some special magical window in which your missives to potential customers are guaranteed to get opened at a higher rate.

She's had great success sending pitches at strange hours, such as 11:23 a.m. on a Sunday, Formacelli asserted. While you can't argue with her personal experience about what works for her, new quantitative evidence shows that Formacelli's good results from sending marketing e-mails at any old hour may be a relatively isolated event.

E-mail marketing firm GetResponse recently combed through a whopping 21 million messages to trawl for patterns that can help business owners better time their e-mails. What they found is that there's a definite pattern to when an e-mail is most likely to be opened--but it's not a simple one.

A blog post announcing the results offers this advice, with caveats:

One of the most important conclusions is that sending newsletters during readers' top engagement times of 8 a.m. to 10 a.m. and 3 p.m. to 4 p.m. can increase their average open rates and CTR by 6%.

However, optimizing e-mail timing takes more than awareness of top engagement times. As our research points out, it’s a combination of many factors, including knowledge of time zone differences, your subscribers' daily routines and the practices of other marketers.

GetResponse also found that "e-mails have the best results within the 1st hour after delivery. This is when 23.63% of all e-mails are opened. But 24 hours after delivery, the average open rate is close to zero." So what does this all boil down to?

Timing generally matters as the longer a message sits in someone's in-box the less likely the person is to read it, and the time a message hangs around isn't entirely due to a recipient's lack of interest. In-box clutter also apparently plays a role. "Almost 40% of all messages are sent between 6 a.m. and noon. This can result in in-box clutter, and significantly decrease results for these e-mails.

Check out the full article here.