22 comments

  • theseanz 2 hours ago

    Hey! As a 46 year old I am offended by this - I am definitely not Gen X. We’re a weird X/Millenial hybrid I’ve seen referred to as Xennials.

    Also F ZScaler - we use this officially sanctioned MTM attack at work and all it does is make my job harder.

    • rf15 an hour ago

      Impressive how many people posting here love the gen [XYZ] categories and feel offended when they are not put in the correctly labeled drawer. ...Shouldn't we move on from this and obsess about something more fun?

      • cannonpr 24 minutes ago

        The label unless you grew up in the Anglo sphere is also especially meaningless, yet certain people insist in labelling the rest of us :) I got to enjoy Phreaking well into the era most others already had ADSL…

    • zetsurin 2 hours ago

      you were born in 1980 you are gen x https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_X by definition.

      • blueflow 3 minutes ago

        Can't be really strict with the dates, the generation thing is cultural and depends on the time and environment of your socialisation.

      • QuantumNomad_ an hour ago

        But also:

        > Xennials, also called Xillenials, are a social cohort encompassing people born on the cusp of or during the later years of Generation X and the early years of the Millennials generation.

        > Many researchers and popular media use birth years from 1977 to 1983, though some extend this further in either direction. Xennials are described as having had an analog childhood and a digital young adulthood.

        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xennials

        • hdgvhicv an hour ago

          Depends a lot on your background. I was online in 1994 as a kid, but my peers weren’t until nearer 1999. Same age. We all got mobile phones when we went to university in sep 2000

    • croisillon an hour ago

      ngl as a 45 y.o. Gen Y i was not so surprised to read what stupid things 46 y.o. Gen X do

    • j45 an hour ago

      I believe the term is xennial: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xennials

      Rare and intersectionally have an unfair advantage.

    • SoftTalker 2 hours ago

      People on the borderlines often are overlooked. I'm an old GenX, a few years too young to be a Boomer, and even the younger Boomers grew up with a quite different experience than the mainline Boomer generation. And I was already an adult and married by the main part of the GenX era.

      • ourmandave 2 hours ago

        Dividing generations across decades might work for marketing to them in general, but it's otherwise about as useful as horoscopes and the BMI scale.

        • hdgvhicv 14 minutes ago

          Precise boundaries are clearly problematic but you can’t claim that someone born in the late 60s had the same type of global view that someone born in the late 80s did.

        • fryanyway_swe 14 minutes ago

          The BMI scale is useful. Yes, athletes and bodybuilders it may not be accurate for, but being on HN I think you are neither :)

          Currently, I am at 20 BMI, for reference.

        • saalweachter an hour ago

          Duodecades are superior to decades, and we can take overlapping pairs of duodecades as "generations" to solve the dividing line problem.

          Duodecades:

            * 1968-1980
            * 1980-1992
            * 1992-2004
            * 2004-2016
            * 2016-2028
          
          Overlapping generations:

            * GenX: 1968-1992
            * Millennial: 1980-2004
            * GenZ: 1992-2016
      • aaronbrethorst 31 minutes ago

        You might be Generation Jones: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_Jones

  • stephbook an hour ago

    The article is unclear: Do they "attack" the GenX managers and encrypt their stuff, or do they simply contact GenX managers in order to get paid faster?

    In that case, the managers aren't "victims" and aren't "attacked", that would be the company..

  • Lucasoato 2 hours ago

    Companies hope that training will protect them from cyber threats, while ignoring that their most vulnerable employees are the ones that lost the motivation to care about their job.

    • calgoo an hour ago

      Training is basically just for legal and insurance reasons... If not there would be no reason to do yearly training of the same bs courses.

  • neilv 2 hours ago

    > Zscaler says they combine information from compromised systems with publicly available data to map reporting lines and identify the employees most likely to influence a company's response.

    And commercially-available data: enterprise salespeople, for example, can buy this intel from data brokers (directly, or with layered services catering to sales funnels specifically).

    It's another way that surveillance capitalism can be a national security threat against the US. You have countless US companies collectively mapping out people networks and assembling often intimate dossiers on individuals... and saving international organized crime and geopolitical adversaries a ton of work, which they might not have the resources to otherwise do.

    • SoftTalker 2 hours ago

      They've learned from how real businesses operate. Ever talked to a salesperson? Notice how much the initial conversation is geared to trying to figure out whether you have any real purchasing authority, and who does if it isn't you?

    • calgoo an hour ago

      So why is this only a threat to US companies and not for businesses in other parts of the world?

      • Nasrudith 19 minutes ago

        US consumers are more valuable which makes their data more valuable and therefore collected. It applies to other first world nations without robust enough data protections.