Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

Someone in my Twitter timeline wrote a post that resonated with me. Instead of advocating the idea of our firms mandating what we can and cannot do in our homes as working from home (WFH) standards, she said how gracious it was for us to let the firms into our home environments where we had already made investments in how and where we wanted to work in our personal space. So much of what we do daily in our personal ecosphere requires authentication.

Google Chrome may currently enjoy the numero uno position in the world of browsers, but it is starting to feel the pressure. The competition is heating up with its rivals like Microsoft Edge offering upgraded security features to lock in more users. The coronavirus pandemic has brought extensive changes to the way people operate, which in turn, has created a need for securing remote workforces.

More information has emerged related to last week’s attack which saw a number of high profile Twitter accounts hijacked for the purposes of spreading a cryptocurrency scam. Twitter has already said that 130 Twitter accounts were targeted by hackers, using tools that should only have been available to the site’s internal support team.

The COVID-19 pandemic has created a huge list of challenges for businesses. One that is potentially going unnoticed or under-reported is cybersecurity. Specifically, as lockdown ends and as individuals return to offices and places of work, it may be the case that something malicious is already waiting for them on their devices. Here we take a look at the cyber risks of remote workers returning to the office.

Many organizations have Information Security Programs (ISPs), but many executives and boards do not know how to measure progress within these programs. They are therefore hesitant to believe any investment in technology will mitigate perceived or even unknown risks. Some organizations use regulated compliance standards such as PCI DSS or AICPA attestations as measures of their ISP.

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) has been in effect for two years in the European Union (EU). As Americans continue to become attentive to GDPR and their own data privacy, it’s not surprising that some data protection guidelines are emerging in the United States. Indeed, it’s safe to assume that California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) was modeled from the EUs data privacy framework.

The demand for cloud computing has skyrocketed in recent years. Lower costs, a faster time to market, increased employee productivity, scalability, and flexibility are some of the beneficial factors motivating organizations to move to the cloud. It’s not likely that organizations will slow down with their migration plans, either.

What the heck has happened on Twitter? Twitter accounts, owned by politicians, celebrities, and large organisations suddenly started tweeting messages to their many millions of followers, at the behest of hackers. What did the messages say? Here is a typical one which appeared on the account of rapper, songwriter, and optimistic Presidential candidate Kanye West and was distributed to his almost 30 million followers.

Research into recent ransomware submissions revealed that more than a tenth of crypto-malware infections now involve some element of data theft. In the second quarter of 2020, ID Ransomware received 100,001 submissions of crypto-malware pertaining to attacks that had targeted organizations and government entities. Of those attacks, 11,642 involved the theft of victim data by their perpetrators. That’s over 11% of the attacks for that six-month period.

For healthcare organizations that handle a lot of patient data, including very sensitive information, cloud computing is a revolution to data storage. Cloud computing in healthcare lowers data storage costs (compared to the old paper-storage era), enables easy retrieval of patient data and also improves the privacy of patient information. This has inevitably led to a rise in the adoption of cloud computing in healthcare.