Today, there are teams of individuals, both state and privately sponsored, whose sole purpose is to break into corporate or government networks to either steal sensitive data, or deploy malware that will bring those networks to their knees.
Read moreRansomware, domain shadowing and malvertising are just a few of the menacing terms you’ll need to get familiar with in order to protect your network in 2015. Cisco’s 2015 Midyear Security Report is out and it’s just the sort of reading that could give any chief information officer nightmares. The 41-page report confirms every security professional’s greatest fears: the bad guys are getting sneakier and our general ability to stop them is lagging dangerously behind.
Read moreWe can prepare for 2015 by learning from past data infringements or compromises that may have affected us personally or professionally. We need to learn from these incidents in order to prevent their reoccurrence or at least mitigate our risk in the future
Read moreAre you like most people who associate cyber, cyber security, data breaches and other similar terms with computers and technology? When you hear about a data breach in the news, do you immediately wonder which technical vulnerability was exploited? This is probably the reason why so many companies believe that a breach won’t happen to their company. They believe hackers only exploit technical vulnerabilities and somehow their tools and techniques for securing data are better than everyone else’s. Regardless of the reason, most are ignoring the one weak link in the chain that is more easily exploited than most technical vulnerabilities but much more difficult to mitigate — the end-user. The employee with access to the network is by far a much greater threat than just about any technical vulnerability. One click and your network is compromised.
Read moreIn my computer security classes, I tease my students that “Backups are good; restores are better.” The unfortunate fact of life is that computer hardware wears out and stops working. Software has bugs. Unfortunately, systems sometimes become infested with malware — so-called malicious software. A particularly ugly kind of attack, such as CryptoLocker, is called “Ransomware.” As Cybersecurity professionals, we call it crypto-viral extortion when a malware attack encrypts a user’s files and then demands payment to retrieve the key to restore the data.
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