Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

By design, Salesforce is an environment where customer PII and other sensitive information must be shared and stored. However, compliance regulations like PCI DSS, HIPAA, GDPR, CCPA, and others limit this storage and usage of customer data to only what’s justifiably required for an organization to carry out its duties. Even then, there are requirements for how this data should be stored – like whether it should be encrypted, for example.

We are pleased to announce the launch of NC Encrypt to provide independent encryption key management and Bring Your Own Key (BYOK) support for Microsoft 365 applications and SharePoint Server environments. The sheer number of communication and collaboration channels the M365 platform has introduced, increases the vulnerability of sensitive data and potential for accidental data loss or overexposure, making protection mechanisms such as encryption critical.

On Thursday evening, around 6:25 PM, Uber announced that it was responding to a cybersecurity incident. While Uber hasn’t gone into details about what happened, the purported threat actor has openly corresponded with several security professionals, including Sam Curry at Yuga Labs, Corben Leo at Zellic.io and The New York Times. According to both Curry and Leo, multiple systems were impacted.

IHG Hotels & Resorts, the hotel group that owns the Holiday Inn and Intercontinental brands, experienced a cyber attack in the first week of September. The attack has impacted the central hotel’s booking system and mobile apps, causing a service outage for several days. Loyalty program members could not log in or create new bookings during this time.

My first interaction with a firewall was with a TIS Gauntlet that I compiled on a Sun workstation in 1994. Since then, I have worked with firewalls from Checkpoint (back when configuration files were clear text flat files and they only had support out of their headquarters in Israel), Raptor, Pix (when they booted from a 3 ¼” floppy), and finally the Cisco ASAs, FortiGates, and Palo Alto firewalls of today.

Data classification can feel like an overwhelming task, especially for organizations without a strong practice in place. As with any security approach, data classification is both crucial and tempting to avoid. Regardless of whether the value is recognized, there’s a chance that it gets pushed further and further down the priority list in favor of items that are easier to address.

The Federal Trade Commission has recently updated the 2003 Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act ‘Safeguards Rule’ to create new standards and procedures that will apply to auto dealerships and go into effect in December 2022. The Safeguards Rule outlines the standards required for the protection of consumer data. The new updates create stricter criteria and procedures that car dealers will need to implement, both to reduce the risk of a data breach and to better protect customer data.

Demands on data have created a host of challenges for security and administration, and traditional tools are not keeping up. As we expand collaboration and business activities outside the office, data moves more widely and user permissions expand with every responsibility or team project. Keeping ahead of this permission burden is tough yet necessary for zero trust “don’t trust, verify” security.

According to research by Statista, over 80% of internet users in the US fear that their personal information is vulnerable to hackers. Data privacy defines how organizations and other entities collect data on other individuals, how they process it, for what purposes they collect and process it, how long they keep it, and how they protect it, to name a few. In the modern digital environment, data privacy certifications are essential since they impart the skills needed to become privacy specialists.