Dynamic Edge Author Archive
Despite the fact that Sunday (November 11th) was in fact National Fraud Day, one thing remains clear. Scammers and cyber thieves continue to convince and deceive users into divulging information and handing over hard earned money.
The Numbers Don’t Lie
Nearly half of users—49 percent—admittedly believe their cyber habits leave them and their employers vulnerable to cyberattacks and data breaches. Let me repeat that. 49 % of workers actually are aware that they are not taking the right steps to protect their personal data—or your sensitive business data and network at large—from cyberattacks.
How can that be?
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What is the reason for having cybersecurity?
When people ask me what I do, it’s often a complicated answer. Information technology in the past 20 years has changed considerably from simply fielding issues related to networking and printing issues to sophisticated threat prevention and detection on top of all other issues.
At the highest level, our job—as IT Support engineers and security specialists—is to manage, mitigate and minimize risks in your organizations. Both risks of users having computer headaches, but even more so eliminating security risks of cyberattacks and data breaches.
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Over a year ago, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) had commissioned a task force to look into cybersecurity—particularly how hospitals and healthcare were doing when it comes to security awareness and prevention.
HHS found that overall organizations are making strides in closing some serious security gaps. BUT one of the biggest gaps that still exist is related to your users.
Security awareness is one HUGE area that still falls behind all others when it comes to risking networks to cyberattacks.
Take a minute to think about that.
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Regardless of what industry you’re in—but ESPECIALLY important if you have compliance demands from HIPAA or PCI—the value of security automation goes far beyond you initial investment.
As your organization has matured from maybe a handful of people to dozens or more, the need for automation is probably apparent in any day to day work your management team is involved.
From HR documents being tracked and recorded to accounting getting payables and payroll done correctly on a timely manner to operations teams and sales teams making sure they are doing value activities that go beyond the rote mechanics of data entry and untracked progression, if you’re successfully scaling your business or organization you have assuredly gotten some help from automation.
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Credential theft was on the rise during Q3 of 2018 in the US, even with apparent declines around the rest of the world.
In fact, credential theft has risen by 141% in the last quarter. That means that compromised credentials are on the uptick and are likely to affect business accounts.
Let me set the scene with a real life story that impacted a potential client of mine.
I got a phone call on my desk phone. I hate getting calls to my desk because I know that the person on the other line is normally in big trouble.
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Phishing has been around almost as long as email itself. Remember those African princes looking for you to wire them money over 20 years back? Those initial emails may not have been much to worry about, but have they changed into believable and life-devastation today.
Phishing remains the largest attack vector onto business and enterprise networks and the most effective tool cybercriminals use to get what they want—identities, information and money.
The reason why phishing is so widely used? It’s cheap, easy, and hits a large target group. All the criminal needs to do is send out thousands upon thousands of emails (mailed to long lists of contacts) and wait for the bites.
On top of the fact that phishing is so easy nowadays, it’s getting more and more sophisticated. Talk tracks in emails are terribly convincing (from those Nubian Prince emails of the ‘90’s). Spoofing email addresses, getting digital information from social media and the web, all make for more believable emails and get the recipients of those emails to do something very simple—click on a link or attachment.
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