Latest news with #Tomaso
Yahoo
01-04-2025
- General
- Yahoo
A teacher helps student start their teaching careers at Baldwin Prep
LOXLEY, Ala. (WKRG) — It's one of the newest schools in the Baldwin County Public School District. And it's where we found out about the interesting work being done by Golden Apple winner Becky Tomaso, a program called the Teacher Cadet Academy. A Golden Apple winning teacher among very talented students 'We are part of the career tech program here at Baldwin Prep — prior to that we were at both North Baldwin and South Baldwin tech schools before moving into this amazing facility,' Tomaso said. 'But our teacher cadet program is a program in the career tech pathway that works to encourage students to become future teachers.' The program is among other career tech programs like aviation, welding, automotive repair, cosmetology and others. Students get some college credit for the course, and they also get practical experience alongside other teachers. 'The best part about it, I think students will agree, is that they get to go into the field,' Tomaso said. 'I have 35 students at 14 different schools around the county.' Tomaso was nominated by one of her seniors Ayvah Voll, who said because of the program she'd already completed more than 270 hours of student teaching, and she owes that success to Ms. Tomaso for preparing her. And what better person to prepare future teachers than one who has been at it for 30 years? Grand Bay Middle teacher joins an exclusive club 'I'm very glad they allowed me to put this program together — I'm pretty passionate about it,' Tomaso said. 'I know sometimes I'll stomp my feet and say 'Mr. Sealy, we have to do it this way,' and he's usually like, you've got it.' Our congratulations to Becky Tomaso and Baldwin Preparatory Academy for a job well done. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Yahoo
28-03-2025
- Climate
- Yahoo
‘Can happen to anyone' really means ‘anyone': abc27 meteorologist's Facebook account hacked
HARRISBURG, Pa. (WHTM) — It all happened during a two-to-three hour period while Meteorologist Dan Tomaso was sleeping — which, given the times he can appear delivering the weather morning, noon and night, can be literally any time of day. 'I'm barely awake, and next thing I know, I'm getting texts from friends and family saying, 'What is this post on Facebook? Is everything okay?' Tomaso said. It was a post on a personal account he uses sporadically to keep in touch with close friends and family. 'My dad's going into a long-term care facility,' Tomaso said, characterizing the fake post. 'We're gonna start offloading some of his things — including cars, dune buggies.' Tomaso is 'not a dune buggy guy,' he said, and thankfully, both of his parents are fine. But the post was so realistic that a friend sent $500 via Venmo to a scam artist, who had hacked Tomaso's account and changed the credentials so Tomaso himself could no longer get in. Other friends he hadn't heard from in years contacted Tomaso to ask if items Tomaso said he tried to contact Facebook support, as any other user would do, but with little success. He managed to chat with a support agent through a different paid 'Meta Verified' account; that ultimately led to help regaining control of his account after about a week, he said. Tomaso concedes he unknowingly made one mistake: The personal account was so old (from back when he was in high school) that multi-factor authentication (i.e., security requiring something other than just a password) didn't exist when he created it, and he never thought to enable it later, even though he says he's security conscious and has safeguards on his other accounts. Jonathan S. Weissman, a principal lecturer in cybersecurity at Rochester Institute of Technology, recommends what's known as an authenticator app 'like Google Authenticator or Microsoft Authenticator. If you do it with an authenticator app, the cyber criminals, in addition to your password, would physically need your phone,' Weissman said. 'The time is always now to implement multi-factor authentication on any account you have.' Or as Tomaso put it: 'Just do it.' Tomaso's other piece of advice is to be wary of uncharacteristic social media posts such as the one the hackers posted on his page. But Tomaso wonders: If the behavior (someone quickly changing his password and then posting something unlike anything he had ever posted on his page) is so obviously fraudulent to him, why didn't all the modern artificial intelligence available to a company like Facebook catch it? Why, for that matter, didn't Google's Gmail filters flag as spam or phishing these three messages — with obvious red flags (from the unusual subject lines, to the personal email addresses for ostensible business mail, to the misspellings like 'State Farmm') sent to this reporter over the course of less than a day? Spokespeople for Google and Meta, Facebook's parent company, didn't respond to requests for comment. But Weissman described cybersecurity as a 'cat-and-mouse' game between companies, whose systems really do have the best security they've ever had, and hackers, who work tirelessly to catch up. 'Cybercriminals are constantly changing their phishing methods — changing words, changing spelling,' Weissman said. In the case of what happened to Tomaso, 'there are many variations and permutations and combinations for Facebook to look for.' Download the abc27 News+ app on your Roku, Amazon Fire TV Stick, and Apple TV devices Or Google, he said, has to strike a balance between flagging dangerous messages and not incorrectly blocking legitimate ones, which could be just as disruptive to a user who misses an important message. Weissman said it's like a seesaw where 'on one side, you have security, and on the other side, you have convenience. When one side goes up, the other side goes down.' Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
