The privacy of our data is a topic we should all continually become more familiar and with January 28 being Data Privacy Day, there’s no better time to start then now. First off, there’s a difference between the security of your data and its privacy. Both of these topics play within the same arena and…
As you’ve probably already noticed a few highly dangerous CPU vulnerabilities have been released that effect the CPU at a hardware level. Since this is base off the hardware itself all operating systems (Windows, Linux, Android, macOS) need to protect against it. This means patching their operating systems to mitigate against the threats that the Intel CPU’s have introduced. Now before you run out and grab the latest patch from the OS vendors be warned. There’s a possibility that this could actually cause negative performance on your system and include system crashes.
Many hackers are opportunistic predators and will slide to the lowest common denominator when preying on their next victims. Over the past year we’ve seen hackers direct their attention to the education sector; particularly K-12. It’s always appalling when children are taken advantage of in any manner and having their data stolen, ransomed, or leaked is no different. These children are the youth of our nation and have no sense of what’s happening to the privacy of their personal data. These breaches could have long term ramifications on children long before they’ve even applied for college or been given a driver’s permit. We live in an age now where hackers will look to disrupt and take advantage of anyone to benefit their own cause. There is no honor among thieves.
National Cyber Security Awareness Month week 4 theme is: The Internet Wants You: Consider a Career in Cybersecurity. Considering the cybersecurity skill shortage, (Frost & Sullivan and (ISC)2 found that the global cybersecurity workforce will have more than 1.5 million unfilled positions by 2020) we should be encouraging students to enter into a cybersecurity career. However,…
With the increasing exploits and attacks of the past year it’s shown us that security needs to be treated as commodity in an organization. Just as there’s coffee in the break room there should be security in your processes. The culture of security needs to be built into the design process itself and today it’s just as important as both marketing and sales. We’ve seen major breaches occur this year which have destroyed organizations reputations, revenue streams and careers.
By now we’re all probably very aware of the massive Equifax hack that exposed 143 million Americans social security numbers, birth dates, addresses and drivers’ licenses. There was also a small subset of credit cards and personal identifying documents released with limited personal information to an uncertain amount of Canadian and UK citizens being accessed as well.
It appears there’s another global ransomware outbreak occurring that’s effecting banks, telco’s, and critical infrastructure.
There are multiple countries in Europe stating they’re infected with confirmed reports coming in from UK, Spain, Ireland, Russia and Ukraine.
The globe was recently hit by a massive ransomware campaign that stretched across 150 countries and infected tens of thousands of systems. The Russian Interior Ministry was affected, certain NHS hospitals were turning patients away and a few manufactures had to cease operations. Needless to say, this was a really big deal. Companies were left scrambling on Friday afternoon in attempts to make sure they weren’t the latest victim of the WannaCryptor 2.0, also known as WannaCry, malware from wreaking havoc in their network. This is the second iteration of this malware and it uses exploits previously found within leaked NSA hacking tools (ETERNALBLUE) that takes advantage of a bug within Windows SMBv1 protocol.
