Understanding the impacts of a data breach

As the home office and remote working creates new, unforeseen vulnerabilities in data security, so have the costs of incidents risen dramatically.  According to research from McAfee and the Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), the total global cost of cybercrime has surpassed $1 trillion per year, and about $500,000 per company. One of the… Read More

Examining cybersecurity before holiday shopping

While October is Cyber Security Awareness month, it turns out November 30 was Computer Security Day.  As the holiday season now coming upon a quarantined populace, it can be useful to examine how things stand in the field of cybersecurity, since few things have such an impact on consumer shopping online. According to a study… Read More

Differing attitudes toward security create remote working risks

We’ve examined in recent weeks the risks that come from widespread remote working.  Now, thanks to a study from Tessian, new insights are coming to light.  Most notably, a disconnect persists between IT staff and an organization’s employees regarding best security behaviors.  Surveying 2,000 professionals in the US and UK, Tessian found that only about… Read More

Data sharing, collection, and personal privacy concerns

The security risks created by COVID-19 continue to abound.  Applications have proliferated in the wild, offering concerned people the chance to test themselves for Coronavirus.  Now, I haven’t used any of these apps, I don’t know how reliable they are, but the point is they are being used.  People are submitting copious amounts of data… Read More

Preparing for the New Year in Cybersecurity

A new FireEye survey is out this month, and it’s interesting, so I wanted to look in to it, and compare it to the Avertium study we covered last time.  One part that stuck out is that this study is even more optimistic about increasing cybersecurity spending.  The latter figure was from approximately half of… Read More

New Ransomware, New Attitudes

Characters in fiction usually have a dark foil as an antagonist.  Superman and Bizarro, Frodo and Gollum, Jerry and Newman.  But what about encryption?  For as heroic as it is and the good it does, what happens when we come up against the dark side of encryption? Yeah, ok, that sounds cheesy.  It is, however,… Read More

Encryption as Part of the Defense Strategy

I always take slight issue with data security articles that say in the title that encryption won’t protect against breaches.  To me it’s a little misleading.  It carries the implication that encryption is almost unnecessary, when that’s not what the article actually goes on to say.  Quite the opposite.  Rather, what they invariably mean is… Read More

Facebook isn’t providing identity theft protection for users

Following up on Facebook’s latest data scandal, new updates have been rolling in.  For instance, did you know that only 30 million accounts were breached in total, and not the 50 million as initially reported?  I guess the company found that 40% reduction satisfactory enough to justify their latest action—or inaction, as it were.  I… Read More

Will Americans Want Their Own GDPR?

Here is something interesting I hadn’t considered in our last GDPR write-up.  As Isaac Cohen at CSO Online points out, all the privacy notification emails US citizens are receiving in light of the new European regulations are alerting them to guidelines that otherwise might have escaped their notice.  As a result, the public is being… Read More

Keeping Kids’ Data Safe

This story is reminiscent of the toy manufacturer VTech’s breach, only with slightly older children.  I’m talking about the teen-monitoring app known as TeenSafe, which was recently discovered to have a vulnerable server, exposing the personal information of thousands of its users.  Many of these are, of course, teenagers.  The app allows for parents or… Read More