Taken from our information security image gallery, here are 8 kickass cyber security awareness tips for you to share with your team. Use them to inspire positive change in behaviour and raise awareness within your organisation:
Helping your staff to understand the part they play in keeping your information secure is an essential first step. Lack of understanding and awareness amongst employees may mean that the organisation is exposed to phishing, pharming and social engineering attacks.
Unauthorised access within your secure perimeter could result in sensitive information ending up in the wrong hands. Make sure staff are aware of your secure perimeter and encourage them to challenge or report people who are not supposed to be there.
Social Media, when used appropriately, offers organisations sales and marketing opportunities that are very effective. Remind staff of your social media policy and ensure it covers what can and cannot be said about your organisation online. You also need to ensure nothing sensitive or confidential is shared online.
What tips do you have to offer? Have you found anything that works particularly well in raising cyber security awareness among your staff? If so, comment below and we may well use your suggestions for our next batch of social media sharing images. We will of course credit you with anything we do use.
On January 16th, 2016, the website of Kickass Torrents remained down the entire day due to being hit by a massive DDoS attack. As per the statement of the website administrators to TorrentFreak, the attackers targeted its DNS servers and launched the DDoS attack.
The attackers are still unidentified but due to the attack, both the official site proxies of Kickass Torrents and the main domain remained inaccessible by users on January 16th. The security team of Kickass Torrents registered the attack on the same day when the site was taken offline.
Europol did make an announcement about the capturing of the newsmaker DD4BC DDoS extortion group in Bosnia and Herzegovina earlier this week. But it is apparent that the actions of this group are being copied by many other DDoSing artists. DD4BC is the first ever group that started launching DDoS attacks and asked for Bitcoin payments as ransom.
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For example, Ragnar has high survivability and is a powerful melee combatant who manages a zone of control very well. He wants to be near foes to bring his melee weapons to bear, he wants to take most of the hits, and he wants to control who the enemy has access to.
Now, run your numbers through whatever stupid system your game of choice gives you for encounter building. Add up your XP budget, decide how many creatures are in the Clouds of Creatures, and finalize that s$&%.
Now, let me show you four examples of the process and then you can get the hell out of here and we can stop talking about combat forever. These are going to be pretty basic, simple examples, but each one will yield a decent combat that would fit into the beginning or middle of any adventure.
The setup for this encounter is pretty simple. There is an underground hobgoblin fortress the party is meant to be invading or murdering or something. In a cave, there is a defensive outpost. A gate, basically. When the gate is attacked, the hobgoblins there have the job of raising the alarm and then delaying the invaders as long as they can to give the rest of the hobgoblins inside time to plan their defenses.
Now, Lidda can outflank the hobgoblins easily and backstab them, cutting through their defenses quickly. We need to make the PCs work for their flanks, pulling the hobgoblins out a little. Maybe give them a chokepoint to hold.
So, the fight will probably play out much better now. The melee PCs will have to move up while taking fire from the goblins. The ranged PCs will engage the goblins. The goblins could support the hobgoblins or fire upon the ranged PCs. Lidda might try to find a way to circle around the hobgoblins or she might try to eliminate the goblin archers. And the goblins might harry Lidda with arrows while she moves into position. The party might try to draw the hobgoblins out of the choke point.
The PCs will be approaching from the opposite end of the encounter area as the gate. I want the melee to be joined quickly, but not too quickly because the goblin archers would like to get some shots off. So I will start the enemies and the PCs about two moves apart. The alarm will be within one move of the goblins. The party has one quick chance to interrupt that, as mentioned. If I wanted to make it easier to interrupt the alarm, I would move it farther away. I will split the goblins into two different groups as well. Finally, I will give the ranged PCs a choice. I will put some covering terrain in the form of natural columns or cave formations within two moves of the entrance. If a ranged PC is willing to give up a round, they can find some cover from the ranged goblins.
Then, if the party is smart, they will fall back into a defensive posture with Ragnar and Jozan forming a wall for Soveliss and Mialee to hide behind. Lidda should hang back at first until Ragnar and Jozan get things under control and turn whatever ghouls are going to be turned and then break out and try to murder who she can safely. If he can, Soveliss will hang back with Mialee so the two of them can make ranged attacks with impunity. Lidda might also go that route.
If you really want to make the battle more difficult for an expert party, or if you really hate your players, you can have the ghouls emerge piecemeal. One or two at a time. That makes it more difficult for Jozan to decide when to turn. But more importantly, since any given party might or might not be able to turn undead, it means the party might adjust their position to deal with an attack from one direction and then get surprised by an attack next round from another direction. But that could be devastating to some parties.
I want the open area in the middle of the battlefield to be tight, but not impossible to move around in. An area that is about a move across is just fine. But I need an approach that lets the ghouls appear pretty close to the party. So, what if we have some sewer pipes that exit into the open space that are partially boarded up. They have about two feet of space on the bottom that the ghouls can crawl out of. That means a ghoul can also drag a PC away into the pipe, forcing another PC to either crawl after them or hack through the boards. That creates a nice, scary moment.
So, this is one of those encounters where I know how it starts but not what is in it. I knew the party was going to be traveling across trackless wilderness, in this case, a very hilly coniferous forest. And I wanted them to meet an NPC. I wanted to establish the NPC as rugged and brave but also wanted the NPC to be overwhelmed and in need of help. I wanted to give them a chance to rescue or lose the NPC by their own merits.
Basically, I wanted the scene to open like this: the party emerges from the tree line into a long, narrow clearing. Suddenly, from the underbrush at the far end of the clearing, the NPC explodes into the clearing, panicked and stumbling, injured. Then, something horrible bursts into view behind him, set on giving chase and bringing him down. The party is unnoticed, but they have to react quickly to intervene.
Now, one of the brutal but neat things about this fight is that gnolls get a bonus move and lesser attack if they drop someone to zero HP. So, if the PCs let the NPC get dropped, someone is going to get attacked. And if one of the PCs get dropped, the NPC might get a nasty surprise.
This last encounter is one that starts off based entirely on a map. To set the background, I have a series of natural caves underneath a giant tree. The dungeon itself is partially flooded and filled with giant tree roots that form bridges and passages through multilevel caverns. And I need to do something at the entrance.
With their regeneration, trolls are damage sponges. The party has to crank out a lot of damage every round to overwhelm the regeneration or shut it down with fire or acid. In the meanwhile, trolls have a moderate armor class for their power level, but they can also put out a lot of damage and they can engage multiple targets at a time.
Assuming the party sees the troll from above and the troll sees them coming, everyone is on equal footing. Ragnar and Jozan, if they are smart, will run down to hold the troll low down on the root. Lidda will clamber or jump down to try and get behind the troll or she might hang back because the troll will deal a lot of damage and use lesser ranged attacks. Mialee and Soveliss will stay safely behind the chokepoint and lay damage down on the troll, presumably with fire spells. The troll will soak up a lot of damage for three or four rounds and then it will be dead.
The chokepoint is a major problem. The terrain works against Lidda, but it works for everyone else. Jozan and Ragnar can just hold the troll anywhere along the root path and Mialee and Soveliss can attack with impunity. Now, part of me is tempted to dump the troll altogether and do something else, but I suddenly have a couple of nasty ideas.
Thank you for posting all of these articles. I recently discovered your web page and have been glued to the computer screen (mostly at the expense of my employer due to lack of time) for the past two weeks trying to get through every article. I have been toying with a few of the fully developed ideas that you have come up with for 5 years + and had to teach myself as a DM (no one i knew played the game). I found your direction extremely helpful and intuitive and worked quickly to completely revamp and re-do the prepared quests that I had for my current group. I Instantly saw an improvement. I look forward to developing my games further (first stab was good but it can always be better) with present and future articles!
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