Each morning, after booting up my laptop, grabbing a cup of coffee and checking my email, I read the latest cybersecurity news from the Wall Street Journal (WSJ Pro Cybersecurity). If you are in the IT industry, especially focused in Cybersecurity, I highly recommend subscribing. One morning a particular article caught my attention.

October is always a turning point seasonally – but did the roots planted during CyberSecurity Awareness Month (NCSAM) bloom all the way into springtime?  The short answer is yes. This designation, launched by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the National Cyber Security Alliance back in 2004, has remained steadfast, unwavering in relevance, importance end effectiveness.

Growing up, spy thrillers were among my favorite movies. There was Sean Connery as the sophisticated James Bond, in classics like Goldfinger and later, Roger Moore in The Spy Who Loved Me. Then, fast-forward 30 years to a new breed of spy with the unassuming Jason Bourne of the Bourne Trilogy. Although unique in their styles, all the characters exemplified grace under pressure and an uncanny intuition of knowing when they were being watched and how to slip

Top 3 Reasons Users Love Linux

1.  A Powerful, Cost-Effective Option: Linux is a powerful alternative for enterprises looking to reduce operational expense and facilitate innovation within their organizations. It provides copious benefits to its users including a wide range of free and paid distributions, increased customization and increased stability.

According to a recent Nielsen report, Americans spend over ten hours every day consuming media. Much of this time is spent on the internet surfing the “surface web,” which includes all websites that are searchable on a typical search engine such as Google. What many people don’t realize is that they also frequently visit the “deep web,” which consists of any websites that a search engine cannot find.

Identity management plays an important part in our everyday lives. It uses all the different pieces of information we have about our users and systems to grant access to tools, functions, software or devices. Effective identity management is essential to enterprise security. Keeping identity information secure, reliable and usable is critical to ensuring that enterprise systems are used appropriately and that sensitive information is protected.

Companies looking to simplify authentication need to decide how their users can access their resources securely - both on location and remotely – and are coming up with creative ways whether it be via fingerprinting, facial recognition, passwords or keycards.

Two cutting-edge technologies that are consistently mentioned in market trends and product advancement are artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML). Often they’re used interchangeably, especially when talking about big data, analytics and other technologies that require processing power, mathematical parsing and data interpretation on massive scales. Unfortunately, these technologies, while related, are not one in the same.

There are two approaches to cybersecurity: proactive and reactive. Security assessments are a great discovery tool for prospects, but also effective to ensure proactive monitoring for any future network vulnerabilities. It starts a dialogue that you, the security expert, can control. The term “security assessment” is very broad though – there are several types of assessments with varying purposes. Where do you start?

 Meltdown and Spectre are read-only attacks or disclosure attacks. In other words, these exploits do not directly force code execution in the OS kernel, in other virtual machines or other programs. However, one could possibly use information gathered from these attacks to feed it into a code execution attack.  The primary risk is in stealing information versus controlling a system.

Studies show that 81 percent of hacking-related breaches used either stolen and/or weak passwords. When thinking about your company’s security structure, anti-virus, firewall and backup are all words that come to mind. However, we seldom think about the minimal things we can do for our company’s security, starting with our users.