Here’s a scenario that was unlikely just two years ago: permanently telecommuting from Honolulu to your financial job on Wall Street. Fast forward to today, the world has accepted that productivity is just as feasible from the beach as it is from a skyscraper. In fact, according to Upwork, nearly 5 million people in the U.S. have moved because of remote work since 2020 with another 19 million planning to do so.

Ransomware is not a new attack vector. In fact, the first malware of its kind appeared more than 30 years ago and was distributed via 5.25-inch floppy disks. To pay the ransom, the victim had to mail money to a P.O. Box in Panama.

It is becoming increasingly difficult to guarantee a safe boundary for your sensitive data. As work-from-anywhere cements, employees are now collaborating freely with each other, with contractors and with partners. But this freedom to collaborate more broadly also means information is being shared among devices, applications and networks that your organization doesn't necessarily have control over.

We live in an IT world surrounded by buzzwords that are largely marketing gimmicks. Zero Trust, for example, is a concept no one actually understands and is slapped onto everything, including derivatives like Zero Trust networks (ZTN) and Zero Trust network access (ZTNA). Then there’s Secure Access Service Edge (SASE), Security Service Edge (SSE) and everything that falls under these frameworks such as Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB), Secure Web Gateway (SWG).

Large construction firms rely on a vast network of architects, engineers, project managers, contractors, and suppliers to collaborate on projects of all sizes and complexities. While the digitization of the construction industry has made it easier for these project teams to share information, it also expands the cyber-attack surface.

In this world, nothing is certain except death and taxes. The latter of which malicious actors capitalize on seasonally with phishing attacks. From consumers to corporate finance and human resources (HR) departments, these social engineering attacks have become so pervasive that the IRS issued an annual advisory as a warning to businesses and consumers.

When a large oil and gas company in southeast Europe set out to migrate on-premises data and applications to public cloud infrastructure, they turned to Lookout to help address the myriad of security challenges that emerged. The Lookout Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB) solution with advanced Data Loss Prevention (DLP) provided the full breadth of integrated features needed to assure all data security and compliance considerations were met while allowing for open cloud data interaction.

I was encouraged when I saw our partners over at Microsoft step in when Russian cyberattacks commenced alongside their invasion of the Ukraine. While there have yet to be any reported attacks on the United States or its allies, I can’t help but think about our collective readiness, especially as sanctions against Russia intensify. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), a federal agency under the U.S.

Gartner® recently predicted that “By 2025, 80% of enterprises will have adopted a strategy to unify web, cloud services and private application access from a single vendor’s security service edge (SSE) platform."* If you don't know what SSE is, you should read my colleague Sundaram Lakshaman’s breakdown of SSE and Secure Access Service Edge (SASE). The gist of it is that SSE is the convergence of security technologies inside the SASE framework.

Here in the United States, we often focus on the cybersecurity readiness of the federal government. The reality is that state and local government departments are just as, if not more vulnerable to cyber attacks. Nearly one quarter of their employees use personal devices for work, where security teams have little visibility, enabling threat actors to execute phishing and other malicious activities. These risks will only continue to grow as in-person services continue remotely.