In the days after Hurricane Matthew struck the Lowcountry, officials warned residents to beware the risk of online scams preying on the storm’s victims.
The concern was that criminals would take aim at South Carolinians desperate to get help or information after the storm. The day after it made landfall, Gov. Nikki Haley warned people to look out for spoof emails saying they had updates about power outages that many evacuees were eager to get. Utilities like South Carolina Electric Gas raised the same caution.
Two weeks later, those threats don’t appear to have materialized to the extent they had feared.
The state Department of Consumer Affairs, which is tasked with tracking identify theft, hasn’t received any reports of storm-related phishing scams, according to spokeswoman Juliana Harris.
Neither has SCEG, spokesman Eric Boomhower said. And for its part, the Charleston-based cybersecurity firm PhishLabs, which was monitoring hurricane phishing attacks, says it hasn’t seen anything out of the ordinary.
But that’s not to say criminals aren’t trying to seize the opportunity. After the storm passed and people got home, some attacks looked to take advantage of their urge to give back.
PhishLabs spokesman Stacy Shelley said the company had spotted some spam emails using the storm as a cover. In one, scammers posed as a desperate mother begging for help after her family’s home was wiped out by the storm.
“I know this might be strange but i have no choice because my kids will die in a matter of 2 days because of hunger,” the email reads. “Our family home was destroyed from the HURRICANE MATTHEW and since then we have been sleeping on the streets. … The Hurricane took everything from us.”
The takeaway: It’s still a good idea to be wary of emails you don’t recognize, so be careful about clicking links or sending money.
Blackbaud cuts
Blackbaud Inc. has cut an unspecified number of jobs in what it says is an effort to “re-align resources.”
The Charleston technology stalwart, which sells software and services to the philanthropic sector, declined to say how many employees lost their jobs or what departments were affected. In a statement, it confirmed that it had “eliminated jobs in a few areas of the company” over the past month and a half.
About half of the Daniel Island-based Blackbaud’s 3,100 employees work in the Lowcountry, and it has announced plans to hire 300 people in Charleston over the next five years in return for state incentives. The company says it has continued to hire in other areas.
“We are executing against our business strategy that holds commitment to customer service as a top priority and that means building and maintaining an agile, flexible and right-sized workforce,” the company said.
Shared space
The digital design agency South is opening a coworking space in its East Bay Street office, with plans to add another location in Colorado. (Thad Moore/staff)
The digital design agency South is opening a coworking space in its East Bay Street office, as the firm looks to carve out room to grow its staff.
Managing partner John McGinn says the firm hopes to host 10 or so members in its coworking space, called Concourse, which sports exposed beams and brick walls. The goal was to give the 14-person company a footprint to grow into a larger office by bringing in a group of freelancers and creatives to cushion the risk of taking on a bigger lease.
South is eyeing a expansion into Denver to make it easier to work with clients in the West, and McGinn said the company would use the same model of using coworking as a way to ease into a new office.
“It’s a great way to set up a space but not necessarily have to have all of our staff when we set up the space,” McGinn said.
Machine learning
The Charleston Digital Corridor is hosting a pair of talks on machine learning this week.
The tech initiative is featuring speakers from the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command – better known as SPAWAR – and the defense contractor CodeLynx to talk about the buzzy concept of computers teaching themselves. The talks will discuss how machine learning works, what changes it will bring and how it can work with augmented reality.
Space is limited for the event, known as CODEtalks, which will be held Thursday afternoon at the corridor’s Flagship building on East Bay Street. Tickets, which cost $49, are available at http://www.chscodecamp.com/courses/codetalks-2016/.