Education is particularly attractive to criminals because of the vast amount of valuable data it holds: student and staff information, supplier information, alumni databases, and research data - so, as security experts, what’s to be done to help schools secure their endpoint devices?
Now more than ever before, the small business sector is beginning to prioritize cybersecurity and cyber liability insurance to mitigate potential crippling financial risk, which is setting the stage for a major trend moving forward: the merging of cybersecurity technology and insurance to mitigate insurer’s risk and provide the best overall coverage for small businesses.
Ransomware – a cyberattack in which attackers hijack computer systems and demand payment to release them – has skyrocketed from a relative rarity a few years ago to the single biggest type of cybercrime today. And there is no end in sight to its growth trajectory. Last year, 2,354 American government entities, healthcare organizations and schools were the victims of ransomware attacks. The average ransomware payout swelled to $178,000 in the first half of 2020, up from $112,000 a year ago, according to ransomware incident response firm Coveware, and few clandestine culprits were caught.
Now that we’ve learned this dependency on the cloud will continue to grow, there are new challenges that organizations have to solve in the year ahead – starting with making these cloud infrastructures more secure. To do this, organizations must reroute the security perimeter to focus on identity. While cloud-based identity can be a complicated concept for a number of reasons, there are a few simple steps organizations can take to evolve their identity access management (IAM) strategies. By moving beyond “effective permissions,” they should instead focus on threats and risks, following a cloud IAM lifecycle approach.
Emergency operations centers (EOCs) are critical decision-making environments. It is vital that these centers have effective, reliable, intuitive technology to allow organizations to collate and interpret data, as well as plan and execute an appropriate emergency response to situations that can pose a danger to life, often with multi-agency involvement. So, when carrying out systems integration in an EOC space where the stakes are so high, how do you ensure you make the correct technology choices? Jon Litt, Senior Manager, Business Development, Government Solutions (US) at Christie highlights how the mission of the EOC is the number one factor to keep in mind.
With increasingly sophisticated attacks on targets of opportunity, how can enterprises ensure they are doing everything possible to safeguard against cyber threats? Surprisingly, we can apply techniques used to fend off enemies throughout ancient history by emperors, warriors, and soldiers to our high-tech environments of today. Below, we’ll examine three civilizations’ decision making and how we can integrate their best practices into modern-day security strategies.
With additional pandemic-related vulnerabilities, these preventable mistakes led to greater losses, and the resulting breaches were often wholly avoidable with simple fixes. Here are four of the most common gaps in security, the high-profile breaches they caused in 2020, and how to prevent your company from becoming the next victim.
As a result of major cyberattacks in 2020, security leaders were forced to be even more cognizant of their approach to protecting their organization, often forcing them to refine and future proof their approaches to this new world of security. After watching the events of 2020 and analyzing threat actors’ approaches, here’s what I expect to see in 2021:
Contact center call volumes will vary from industry to industry and from month to month, but the general trend is steeply upward. Adding new agents isn’t the only or even the most efficient way that contact center managers can respond to the great COVID crunch of 2021. A properly deployed Interactive Voice Response system can make workloads manageable for agents while keeping customers from long and frustrating minutes on hold. Still, new options for callers may correspond to new opportunities for attackers.
Quantum computing, the use of quantum phenomena such as superposition and entanglement to perform computation, is expected to impact many sectors, including healthcare, energy, finance, entertainment, and security.
Before this large-scale impact is achieved, several challenges need to be overcome, and security leaders should start preparing for this change, says Sergey Strakhov, Chief Technology Officer at IronCap. Here, we talk to Strakhov about the impact quantum computing will have on security and the potential risks it poses.