Survey shows 89 percent of industries became victims of identity-based attacks in 2022.

As per the latest study from One Identity, identity-based attacks in 2022 were observed in almost every company, including top firms. The report was based on the responses collected from 1,000 information technology experts. The survey showed that almost eighty percent of the industries came across this type of attack in 2022.

In response to such attacks, the companies have started to analyze their security measures. Eighty percent of the companies believe that a high-end security defense can help them either counter these attacks or minimize the damage. As per the report, phishing attacks were the most common, with almost sixty-eight percent of firms getting hit by them, followed by stolen credentials with thirty-eight percent.

Taking a look back on the last sixty years, it can be seen that things are pretty much the same when it comes to identity attacks. Industries are increasing their defenses. Ninety-six percent of them are using a number of tools to protect their data, while forty-six percent are using over twenty-five different tools.

However, increasing the number of defenses doesn’t mean they are now protected; in fact, it’s costing them over one hundred thousand dollars annually for tools that are not even being utilized.

Over 51 percent of the industries are now planning to strengthen their tools instead of increasing the number. Thirty-seven percent of them believe that such measures will make it easier for them to adapt to things changing with time.

With the new year just around the corner, it is believed that the number of identities being used by companies will keep increasing. Currently, 52 percent of the companies are already dealing with over 10,000 different identities. The latest approach suggests that a common ground for identities will make things easy to manage.

In this way, businesses can lower their annual expenditures and, furthermore, offer a much better-secured platform by protecting their data from such attacks.

Now all that's left to see are the results coming from a common ground for all identities. Since the frequency of attacks keeps rising every year, it’s hard to believe that it will help companies with their problem.

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by Arooj Ahmed via Digital Information World

How to Find Your Target Audience through Social Media?

Building your online presence and creating engaging content is the key to growth on social media. However, running your business with a perfect "Target Audience" is the thing that comes first.

Social Media has changed the way we live and communicate. Millions of users are leveraging social media, and it is a huge source of revenue for them.

Around 300 million people in the United States use social media; the number is expected to grow steadily by 2027. To find your own target audience, you can start by looking at the numbers for platforms like Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram, where billions of users can be found.

Social media is a valuable opportunity for reaching your target audience if you have an effective content strategy.

The first step to finding your target audience through social media is by understanding the surrounding of your content. You should make sure it resonates with your target audience. To find out who exactly is watching your content, you will need to learn about the demographics. This demographic data helps marketers to know the likes and dislikes of the people who follow them on social media. It will help you improve and keep going.

The second step of this activity is all about deliverance and your attitude. When sharing your content, tone is an important factor. The way you communicate with content can allow you to reach new audiences. Responses from these new people are the key element to focus on. The other element that is really effective is the timing of your content. Content can become more well-liked when it is in trend. Depending on trends or other significant events, you might decide when and how to introduce yourself to a new audience.

Then comes the third step, which is all about the emotional state. It is essential not to give quick reactions against the response of your audience. Being confident and improving your content to meet their needs or interests, will benefit you in the long run. If you complete the very first two steps, the third phase will be simpler because social media analytics will be more consistent.

The social media environment is playing a significant role in modern audience discovery. Following these three steps can make it much simpler to understand how online practices work to find your targeted audiences. Take a look at the infographic below for more insights on how to find and build the perfect audience for your brand.

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by Arooj Ahmed via Digital Information World

Study reveals the most innovative U.S cities of 2022

According to a study by The Fabricator, Seattle, which is a city in Washington USA, is the most innovative city in 2022.

The study emphasized that it is the people that bring the innovation, and to take complete advantage of the innovation, it is necessary to support and engage more and more STEM workers where STEM stands for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics.

The report was generated keeping in view the total number of STEM workers, their average income, and the women percentage being employed. Additionally, the report also collected data in the form of the total number of college graduates having a STEM degree and thus developed this report of the most innovative cities in the USA.

As The Fabricator report ranked Seattle as the most innovative city in the USA, this is less astonishing as the city is the center for tech development and scientific innovation. Many places depict the fact that Seattle is the most innovative city in the US because of many firms and companies ranging from the Museum of Flight, and Living Computers – a famous museum, to the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation lies in Seattle.

Moving forward, the report presented Baltimore, a city in the U.S. state of Maryland, as the second most innovative US city in 2022. Among many other factors, one of the reasons for placing Baltimore after Seattle is that Baltimore hosts an Innovation Week every year.

As we move in the list, one can see that San Jose (a city in the U.S. state of California) is in the third position, and why is it so? Well, it is the leading technology innovator across the U.S.

It would not be wrong to call the American state California the most innovative state, as it comprises 6 out of 10 cities that have been included in the list of most innovative cities in America by The Fabricator. Speaking of other states, Maryland, Massachusetts, North Carolina, and Colorado are the states having a lead in innovation after California.

The research also showed that Seattle is the city having the average STEM worker salary of around 124,000 US dollars which is the highest income in Washington, USA. A thing to note here is that Wyoming has a 63% lower average STEM worker salary than Washington. It has been mentioned in the report that Wyoming has an average salary of $68,770 for a STEM employee.

Another fact that the report shared, is that the state of Wyoming has just 2970 employees as STEM workers which is the lowest in the USA. The research has also done some standardization by state population, and it was discovered that Louisiana has the least percentage of STEM employees per hundred thousand people. It is not a coincidence that neither Louisiana nor Wyoming does not have a single city in the most innovative cities in the 2022 catalog.

Some of the key points are that the state with the highest number of STEM employees is the state of California having 662110 workers. This is because California hosts 6 out of 10 cities in the most innovative cities table. Besides, the demand for STEM employees is more and salaries are also better in California.

As far as women as STEM workers are concerned, Maryland, with 7.5%, is at the top of the list whereas South Dakota having only 2.6% is at the bottom.

Moreover, the amount of Google searches for STEM jobs can also be beneficial in predicting interest in such jobs per city. For instance, New York City holds the highest number of Google searches related to STEM jobs followed by Houston, Los Angeles, and Chicago.

The report concluded by stating that for innovation to boost, it is necessary to support people by paying them well, and increasing diversity in workplaces so that a business can boom in the best possible way.

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by Arooj Ahmed via Digital Information World

Americans Have Less Working Hours But Their Pay Is Higher than The Poor Countries in Which Workers Have Long Working Hours

There's always a notion going around that the more hours you work, the more you will earn. But how much is this true? Ruben Berge Mathisen made a whole report about the average working hours of Americans and how much they get paid after working. Different people have different kinds of jobs so everyone has different working hours in which they earn different amounts of money. The Current Population Survey being held in 2022 used data from different Americans who were doing different kinds of jobs. This data wasn't about the working hours of the employees on their contract, but it included the hours they worked at their workplace. So extra shifts, side gigs, and other jobs were also added to the working hours for this survey.

This survey showed the comparisons between the working hours of top earners and the working hours of people who earn less. The survey concluded that Americans with the top 10% income worked 4.4 more hours than the people with the lowest 10% income. When this survey was conducted in other countries, the results were similar even though the number of respondents was less. This showed that the norms of working hours are almost the same in different countries but people with high income work almost the same amount of time as people with low payments.

When the average of different countries was taken, it showed that the people with high salaries in the top 10% spot from almost 27 countries worked one hour less than the lower 10%. This was among the people who worked full-time jobs and different other working sectors. The study showed that people who live in poor and underdeveloped countries are more inclined towards working more hours than people living in developed countries. Our World in Data showed the comparison between average working hours in Cambodia and Switzerland. In Cambodia, the average working hours of people are 9.4 hours a day while in Switzerland, they are 6 hours a day.

There are many factors which are involved in working hours and pay. One of the most important is technology or more equipment which increases the productivity rate. In poor countries, these kinds of facilities aren't available. That is why the workers have to do all the work by themselves and it takes more hours. But in rich countries, most of the work is done by tech equipment so the workers do not have to put much of their input. For instance, in America farm production became 16 times more productive in 2011 as compared to 1948. It was all possible because of innovations in machinery and management. That's why the work hours also decreased.

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by Arooj Ahmed via Digital Information World

New Research Confirms Cyberbullying Is On The Rise Among US Teens

The Pew Research Center found that nearly 50% of the respondents taking part in a new study had experienced cyberbullying of some sort.

This just goes to show how crime is at an all-time high among teens in teenagers in the US as they went through at least one in six types of cyberbullying behavior that was delineated by this team of experts.

In case you’re wondering what those six behaviors are, we’ve listed them down below for you. For starters, it’s constantly getting asked about their whereabouts and what form of activities they might be engaged in, and who they might be accompanying.

Next up, they may admit to having explicit content shared online without any form of permission provided. They could similarly confirm that they were called some offensive names or received threats of an alarming physical nature.

Getting explicit images that may not have been requested and even spreading some of the most false rumors about themselves.

If there was one characteristic that led the pack in terms of behavior patterns, it was definitely name-calling. There 30% of people mentioned how commonly they’ve been called something derogatory online or across their smartphone devices.

This was followed up by some fake rumors, getting explicit pictures, being stalked by someone that’s not a parent, receiving physical threats, and getting images shared. And it’s amazing how a lot of teens are affected by not one by many of these behaviors online that really characterize the cyberbullying situation as intense.

Teenagers that were between the ages of 15 to 17 were the ones to go through around one form of cyberbullying incident. Meanwhile, the study by Pew outlined how older females were bound to be victimized greater than any other person out there. This was clearly seen when compared against their counterpart males of the same age group in the study.

At the same time, younger females were also the center of attention for false rumors or getting monitored by people that weren’t their actual guardians or parent. And when such people were questioned about why they turned out to be targeted, the answer was simple. They felt it was due to a certain way they appeared or carried themselves and some gave the reasoning of race or ethnicity.

It was more Black females than anyone else that had been targeted as per their race and when compared to others of Hispanic or white ethnicity.

Bullying is definitely nothing new in this world. It’s been taking place even before the term and concept of the internet or the world wide web came into existence. But this particular research by experts at Pew has clearly mentioned that such research is generating more awareness on the matter and it’s proven how bullying really increased since the arrival of the internet, smartphones, and the world of social media.

It’s just that such factors have really brought forward a new and very public ground for the matter to take a new shape and negatively impact so many online users around the globe.

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by Dr. Hura Anwar via Digital Information World

What Is Synthetic Identity Theft and Why Are Mostly The Children Victims of It?

According to the Federal Trade Commission, 85% of identity theft happening nowadays is synthetic where the thieves use your information to get to your credit cards and they use them to make different purchases and take loans. Most of the victims of this theft are youngsters because their credit doesn't get monitored often and when they want to pay their college loans, they find out that their credit is no longer safe for them to use.

In 2015, about $6 billion were lost because of Synthetic Identity theft but since then they increased to $20 billion in 2020. But parents do not know how to protect the credit of their children but here's a guide for them to save themselves as well as their children from this theft which is growing each passing day.

According to a study, 2 in 3 Americans (67%) do not know what synthetic identity theft is. Only 1% say that they have good knowledge about it while 32% say that they are somewhat familiar with it. To put it short, the Social Security Number of Americans that got stolen is used for Synthetic Identity Theft. The first thing thieves do after getting SSNs is steal your credit. They can get their hands on $500 to $10,000 and even more credit and can make purchases from it without the person ever finding out. The SSN can get stolen from your mobile phone or any other device that has your email, password, or other places which store your data.

Many people use credit monitoring services but they are not much effective against synthetic identity theft. You need to check your credit from time to time yourself to see if any theft is happening around. Children are the biggest victim of it because they and their parents do not check their credit much. Most of the time, the children are also a victim of it because they are not in control of their credit. More than 70% of the time, identity theft is done by someone who the child knew personally and who had control over his credit.

There are many ways that parents can prevent synthetic identity theft on their child's credit but very few take proper measures for it. In comparison to 2020, only a few parents are concerned about this theft but a large number of parents are not sharing their child's SSN unnecessarily with other people. If you want to prevent this theft from happening, keep the card of your child's social security number in a locked drawer and if you have written it somewhere on your mobile phone, keep the file locked with a strong password. If any bank or authority is asking for the child's SSN, give it to them only after confirming that they are authentic. Never give the child's data to anyone, including uncles and grandparents. There is a chance that they can unknowingly share it with someone else.

Ask the school administration of your child to keep his data safe according to cybersecurity policies and wipe away any data on your device which is of no use to you. Always educate your children that they shouldn't give their personal information to anyone including their friends and schoolfellows. If you suspect that you or your child is a victim of identity theft, change your security information like emails and passwords of sensitive documents and start a recovery plan by going to www.identitytheft.gov.

Contact the companies and tell them that it wasn't you who made all the purchases and took loans. These are the only ways you can stop synthetic identity theft from happening.

H/T: SecOrg
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by Arooj Ahmed via Digital Information World

A New Study Shows That Many Employees Are Not Happy in Their Workplaces Because Their Boss Do Not Show Them Appreciation

According to a recent study, about 64% of employees are not satisfied with their boss. This study was published after a survey of 2,000 American employees who applied to different companies over the past five years. Out of all these surveyed respondents, 65% said that they are willing to work with an underappreciated manager if their coworkers still appreciate their work. 59% of people believe that their boss has never appreciated their work and most of them say that they feel like their employer isn't recognizing their work as they should. 29% of these people are even willing to let their boss reduce their pay if this means that the employer will praise their work.

This survey was conducted by OnePoll and Bonusly to figure out what the employees need from their bosses or employers. There are many ways by which employees feel underappreciated. 41% say that when their boss favors other employees and disregards them, they feel hurt. 39% say that their boss doesn't communicate with them well enough which makes them insecure and they feel unconfident about the work they do.

This isn't all because a higher percentage of 46% of employees have left their job because they do not feel wanted by their bosses. This shows how appreciation by the boss is important in the workplace. The report also showed how employees would like to get recognition from their employers. 35% of people want bonuses or salary increases as a form of appreciation from their boss. 65% say that they will have an achievement motive while working if they know that their supervisors are going to appreciate them for their efforts.

Most of the employees say that they don't just want payment but they also want the validity of their work. About 68% of employees say that they don't want to work in companies that do not offer them any special development favors while 77% say that if they work in a company they need different opportunities by which they can climb up higher on their ranks. 25% of employees say that they want to coach at their workplaces so they can improve themselves. Only 22% will be happy with just a mere appreciation for their work while others have some demands so they work well.

38% of employees need appreciation from their supervisor but 35% want to be recognized by the people they work with. Similarly, 35% want praise from the CEO of the company. It's safe to say that employees do not need salaries only but they also want to be recognized and appreciated.

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by Arooj Ahmed via Digital Information World