Security

Don’t close this tab! I know there are few combinations of words less interesting than business, email, and compromise. I may as well have written an article about fiber, socks, and responsibility. But this isn’t a boring article; it’s an article about email con artists who, according to the FBI, are pulling in $26 billion a year by scamming people.

So yeah, business email compromise (BEC) scams are a big deal. The con artists behind this criminal enterprise will cold-email you, pretending to be someone you work with, in order to gain access to money or information. You might get an email that appears to be from your company’s CEO asking you to quickly do something like buy gift cards, or you might get an email that looks like it’s from an employee at your company asking you to change their direct deposit information. The scam itself can take a lot of forms, but the end goal is to somehow siphon money away from you or the business you work for.

If you’ve been keeping up with all the news out of WWDC 2024 this week, you’ll know that Apple is bringing the RCS (Rich Communication Services) messaging standard to iPhones later this year with iOS 18. That’s a win for Google, which has long backed RCS on Android. But what actually is RCS? And why does supporting it matter?

The short version: It’s an upgrade on the standard SMS/MMS texting standards that smartphones have been using from the start. It brings better support for all the cool features we’re used to in our messaging apps, like read receipts and images, and it adds some extra security layers too.