Chances are, you’ve never heard of The Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC). However, if your company is trying to recover from a ransomware attack, you could unwittingly find yourself in OFAC’s crosshairs and subject to business-crippling fines and penalties. OFAC has been called “the most powerful yet unknown agency in the U.S. government.” An [...]
“Open Sesame!” With this phrase, the title character of the 18th-century folk tale “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves” was able to gain entry to a secret cavern filled with gold, silver and other riches. The part of the story most people forget is that Ali Baba’s brother was later killed after he forgot the [...]
In July 2017, Adobe announced that it would no longer distribute or update Flash Player as of Dec. 31, 2020. Adobe decided to stop supporting Flash Player because HTML5 and other open standards are better alternatives for interactive web content and animations. The major browser vendors favor these open standards over plug-ins such as Flash [...]
Most conversations about IT security — and investments in IT security — tend to focus on external forces trying to infiltrate a network at the perimeter, steal sensitive data and sell it to the highest bidder. However, many experts agree that insider threats represent a significant security risk to organizations. An insider threat is typically [...]
“Scream now, while there’s still room to breathe.” That’s an advertising tagline from “The Blob,” an old sci-fi movie about an alien ball of gelatinous goo that consumes everything in its path as it grows uncontrollably larger and larger. That sounds a bit like the data storage environment in most organizations today, doesn’t it? Data [...]
In 1978, a marketing manager with Digital Equipment Corporation sent an unsolicited electronic message to hundreds of ARPANET users promoting the company’s new mainframe computers. It is the first known instance of spam, and it kicked off four decades worth of unwelcome, unwanted and unrelenting email abuses. Email has since become the de facto standard [...]
Ransomware attacks are up sharply during the coronavirus pandemic, with researchers identifying nearly 80 million such attacks during the first half of 2020 — a 109 percent increase from 2019’s midyear total. In a particularly concerning trend, many of these attacks are now targeting backup data in addition to primary data. Robust backup practices have [...]
There has been a long-running debate regarding the relative benefits of in-house IT vs. managed services for user support. While there continue to be pros and cons on both sides, the growth of remote work and changes in the way IT services are delivered have put more “pros” in the managed services column. Organizations with [...]
Few organizations would give every employee access to HR and accounting systems. But an astonishing number of organizations fail to control access to other sensitive information. A 2019 study by Varonis Data Lab found that 53 percent of companies had at least 1,000 sensitive files that could be accessed by all employees. Almost one-quarter (22 [...]
There’s no question that organizations are migrating more workloads to the cloud in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The reasons vary, however. A global LogicMonitor study of 500 IT decision-makers conducted in May and June 2020 found that organizations are moving to the cloud to enable remote operations and gain access to IT services that [...]
