Almost 18 months since the 2017 massive outbreak, the WannaCry ransomware remains a cyber threat based on recent research from Kaspersky Labs showing 75,000 infections over the last three months.
Cyber Security
Cyber criminals, state-sponsored hackers and even the occasional disgruntled employee are constantly looking to gain unauthorized access for a variety of purposes: theft of money, cyber espionage, personal information for sale or for use in scams, and damage to critical infrastructure for just a few of the most common.
So how does an organization mitigate an entire world full of continual cyber attacks? Just as buildings have a number of necessary elements of physical security: access control, cameras, alarms and so on; there are similar key elements of cyber security that are absolutely vital for just about any modern business.
It starts with identifying and closing the most common doors that attackers use. For example, phishing attacks on employees are far and away the most common initial point of entry. The breach of even a low-level employee account can quickly turn into an escalation in access privileges and the ability to reach sensitive information. This is also true of smart devices, which are generally more poorly secured than computers and phones.
Mapping toxic combinations and implementing separation of duties rules doesn’t have to be a painful process. Strong, regularly maintained SOD controls can help organizations identify and remediate those toxic combinations in an efficient and straightforward manner, limiting the potential damage of fraud and identity-based attacks.
A wanted Swiss hacker accessed a federal No Fly List containing millions of records that was sitting on an unsecured server operated by a regional airline company.
Exploitable features are the favored means by which to penetrate OT devices, and the current research finds that they continue to be an issue in industrial control systems.
US and UK water companies Veolia North America and Southern Water have confirmed a ransomware attack and a data breach that leaked personal information.
While an uptick in cyber attacks on US hospitals is on trend for 2020, the FBI is warning that it has evidence of a coordinated criminal attack on the country's healthcare system.
Fortune 500 companies continue to demonstrate extreme wariness of AI chatbots and similar AI tools in the workplace, as Apple has banned employees from using ChatGPT on work devices.
From a sample base of over 17 million referrals from Twitter collected over the past three quarters from American websites, an average of 8.55% of all traffic originating from Twitter was invalid. Organic traffic showed an invalid rate of 10.43%, nearly twice that of paid which averaged 5.13% invalid, just barely missing Twitter’s own mDAU reporting of 5%.
Balancing the need for privacy, security and profit is the defining debate of the internet age, impacting all of our lives. Each change to the way privacy and technology intersect needs to be examined on its own merits.
It’s easy to see why network admins are often compared to superheroes – they go above and beyond offering infrastructural eyes and ears, responding rapidly to threats, and providing the backbone of modern business operations.










