Recently I was talking to the network manager of a school district in Georgia. The district had just experienced a large scale malware attack. It started in the transportation department, which had refused to let go of some outdated machines that were susceptible to the EternalBlue windows vulnerability, made famous by the WannaCry and NotPetya malware encryption attacks last summer.
Popping up on prime time television and local news reports, ransomware is so commonplace it has practically become a household phrase. The frequent attacks have made it a focus area for many enterprises because high-profile attacks against them have risen dramatically in the past few years.
It’s been two weeks since the IT world was rocked by the news of the CPU vulnerabilities known as Meltdown and Spectre. It’s making headline news due to how far the vulnerabilities extend—to nearly every processor manufactured over the past 20 years—as well as the potential impacts in mitigating these vulnerabilities. Every server, computer, tablet, phone or any other computing device with a modern CPU is potentially affected. (See WEI’s Customer Advisory about Meltdown and Spectre in this blog post.)
This holiday season, the frenzy is not about the “must have” toy, it is the must have investment – Bitcoin. The TV networks cannot stop talking about the dramatic rise in its value that seems to occur on a daily basis, if not hourly. The cable business news shows shuffle in cryptocurrency and financial industry pundits to discuss the significance the new digital gold and the cryptocurrency market at large. They debate each other whether bitcoin is a sure deal that will continue returning positive dividends, or a bubble that is about to burst. Both sides of the argument have their “experts” as to why you should or should not get involved bitcoin mania. CNBC reports that people are maxing out their credit cards to buy, buy, and buy. Some people are even taking home equity loans on their house to maximize the number of coins they can afford.
Mark Twain popularized the phrase, “There’s gold in them thar hills,” when he wrote about the gold rush of 1849. Today, the gold lies not in the hills of California, but within crypto mining servers dispersed across the Internet. This new gold is not mined by the power of the pick and shovel, or even dynamite. Instead, computer processors power the mining operations that create this digital gold. Welcome to the modern day gold rush of today’s digital age.
Last year, ransomware became a $1 billion dollar industry. If ransomware were a traditional legitimate industry it would be the focus of case studies for business schools at colleges and universities across the world. Its exponential growth has been unprecedented and its nefarious means of encrypting one’s data files to garner ransom has captured the headlines of newspapers, journals, blog sites, and news channels. One billion dollars brings a lot of attention and spotlight to something.
Nearly every day, there is a new cybersecurity breach to announce; businesses should be more alert than ever before. In 2015, the Ponemon Institute and Symantec discovered that a whopping 47 percent of U.S. data breaches were the result of a malicious insider or criminal cyberattack. Read on for an illuminating look into recent high-profile cases, and what you can learn from them.
With the wide range of reported cybersecurity incidents and hackers getting more creative than ever before, there is no shortage of threats to the modern enterprise. IT managers must not only secure current data and systems, but preemptively protect against ongoing future threats, which are constantly evolving. While there are well-known versions of malware, “Tellingly, WatchGuard’s inaugural Internet Security Report found that some 30 percent of malware in Q4 was new, or ‘zero day.’ (Not to be confused with zero-day exploits.) In other words, one-third of malware identified wouldn’t be caught by legacy antivirus solutions,” according to PYMNTS.
Unsecured printing and imaging leads to security breaches, putting organizations at risk of costly lawsuits and public relations nightmares.
Today’s printers can connect to wireless networks, scan and send documents, store data on hard drives, and even produce 3D materials. They have many of the same capabilities—and the same vulnerabilities—as computers. As their features increase, so do the opportunities for security breaches in the printing process.
We recently shared five smart moves for IT leaders to focus on when creating an effective cybersecurity strategy. They included basic care like updating an employee security policy and avoiding physical theft, but they also covered monitoring digital footprints in order to thwart malicious insider threats. In this blog post we dive into some additional risks your organization may be facing, and what you can do to stop them.
