The Internal Revenue Service recently warned of an ongoing IRS-impersonation scam that appears to primarily target educational institutions, including students and staff who have ".edu" email addresses.
How can consumers and retailers protect themselves against fraud in the coming months? Here, Jane Lee, Trust and Safety Architect at Sift, speaks to Security magazine about this critical issue.
Bitglass announced the release of its 2021 Remote Workforce Security Report. Bitglass surveyed IT and security professionals to understand how remote work has transformed the state of security operations over the last year. Data from this report shows that the majority of organizations (57%) still have over three-quarters of their teams working remotely. An overwhelming 90% of organizations said they are likely to continue these increased levels of remote work in the future due to productivity benefits. Additionally, 53% of companies said they are looking to make some positions permanently remote after the COVID crisis ends--a much higher rate than when the pandemic began (33%).
Online risk mitigation specialists DNProtect released details of their market report that exposes a high number of security issues related to the domain names that Fortune 500 companies rely upon for business and consumer interaction. The report serves as an early warning indicator of possible security threats and open windows for domain theft or service disruption. The market release follows a number of recent high profile cases involving GoDaddy, Network Solutions, and other registrars where critical domain names were stolen, resulting in disruptions that can easily impact millions of Internet users.
When is the last time you assessed your monitoring platform? You may have already noticed signs indicating that your tools are not keeping up with the rapidly changing digital workforce – gathering nonessential data while failing to forewarn you about legitimate issues to your network operations. Post-2020, these systems have to handle workforces that are staying connected digitally regardless of where employees are working. Your monitoring tools should be hyper-focused on alerting you to issues from outside your network and any weakness from within it. Often, we turn out to be monitoring for too much and still missing the essential problems until it’s too late.
China has had a tough 2020. Intellectual property rights infringement, stealing university and U.S. government-funded research, spys routed out in public, Hong-Kong takeover, Human-right abuses, Coronavirus cover-ups, supply-chain bog downs, and the list goes on. The conclusion is that China has lost its luster with businesses in the United States and abroad. These issues are not new; instead, they have reached a boiling point where the international business community is getting leary of putting too many eggs in China’s basket. The U.S. government has certainly done its share to bring many of these things to light. And while this is happening, and companies look elsewhere to move, the possibilities of increasing North America manufacturing has become more attractive than ever.
Rather than be caught off-guard and left to play catch-up, security and IT professionals should begin planning now for the many new and updated regulations, standards and proposed pieces of legislation that will be sweeping over the financial services industry and other sectors in the near future.
According to Transmit Security’s State of Customer Authentication report, 55% of consumers have stopped using a website because of the login process and more than 87% have been locked out of an online account because of an error-ridden password process.
March 30, 2021
Transmit Security has released “The Impact of Passwords on Your Business,” a State of Customer Authentication report that includes customer experience insights based on its survey of 600 U.S. consumers. According to the report findings, organizations are losing potential customers and a substantial amount of revenue due to their dependency on traditional password systems and outdated customer authentication models.
Acronis released the findings of its second annual Cyber Protection Week survey, which uncovered a dangerous disconnect between the need for organizations to keep their data protected and the ineffective investments they’ve made trying to reach that goal. While 2020 saw companies purchase new systems to enable and secure remote workers during the COVID-19 pandemic, those investments are not paying off. The global survey discovered that 80% of companies now run as many as 10 solutions simultaneously for their data protection and cybersecurity needs – yet more than half of those organizations suffered unexpected downtime last year because of data loss.
Deepfakes –mostly falsified videos and images combining the terms “deep learning” and “fake” – weren’t limited in 2019 to the Nixon presentation and were not uncommon before that. But today they are more numerous and realistic-looking and, most important, increasingly dangerous. And there is no better example of that than the warning this month (March 2021) by the FBI that nation-states are virtually certain to use deepfakes to help propagate increasingly misleading campaigns in the U.S. in coming weeks.