Blog: The Advisor

The cryptocurrency boom is at an all-time high. If you're not familiar with the word, you've probably heard about the most ubiquitous cryptocurrency: Bitcoin. 

 

Last year, I personally mentored 164 people transitioning into security or moving upward in their security careers. That's 164 personal relationships where we met (digitally) face to face and talked. That doesn't count social media direct messaging or anything else. Just one-on-one time talking.

The last three weeks have been high profile for ransomware attacks in the US. The outdoor navigation company Garmin was hit in late July with a huge ransomware attack and paid multiple millions of dollars to a hacker group in Russia known as Evil Corp. While most of us know Garmin for fitness apps, the real impact here was that pilots were unable to update or download new maps from Garmin’s flight navigation server which is a MAJOR safety issue! Just last week, the Maze hacker group locked the camera manufacturer and multimedia company Canon offline. According to Maze, stole 4 TB of sensitive data. To date Maze has only proven marketing content. With as fast as Canon came back online, most practitioners surmise that they paid the ransom. This week the Sodinokibi group who run the REvil malware set announced that they stole over a terabyte of data (including substantial intellectual property and client data) from Brown-Forman, the US liquor conglomerate that owns brands like Jack Daniels, Finlandia, and Sonoma-Cutter wines among others. Brown-Forman confirmed that the data had been ex-filtrated but are not currently pursuing paying the ransom. It appears that neither Evil Corp nor Maze are specifically targeting intellectual property but are using intellectual property and or blocked access to leverage high ransoms.

There’s been a rapid upheaval in corporate America, with some job titles disappearing entirely and new ones rising to the top of organizational charts. In my opinion, the job description of a Chief Information Officer has potentially changed the most. In fact, a number of people argue that the position is obsolete, particularly with the advent of BYOD and personal applications, platforms like Salesforce.com and the use of offsite servers.

Everyone's talking about blockchain’s untapped potential. Its touted benefits may include lower cost, risk, and capital requirements, faster transactions, more transparency and reliability, improved privacy, and unparalleled security, to name a few.

Late last year, industry analyst group Gartner issued a report on the market for Cloud Access Security Brokers (CASB), a software service that’s not yet widely understood. The report included a startling statistic: by 2020, Gartner predicts that 60 percent of large enterprises will use a CASB to govern cloud services. Today, we’re at just over 10 percent usage.

Over the past few years it’s become clear that the fortress mentality of securing the perimeter and hardening the system is not effective in today’s cyberthreat environment. Even if you add in patching all your software, and randomize passwords, bad actors are going to get past your heavily guarded gate and into your network.

Cybercriminals have their sites on healthcare data. See tips for how to protect this sensitive information. It’s an understatement to say that data security is critical in healthcare, where a breach can not only impact an organization’s effectiveness and reputation but also affect patient privacy and—worst-case scenario—health and safety.

The New Relationship with Cyxtera Speaks to StrataCore’s Commitment to Build a World-Class Partner Portfolio to Enable Enterprise Services to End-Users Across the Globe.

Protect your company's assets in a world that's increasingly dominated by mobile technology and IoT According to Computer World, there will be more than 25 billion connected online devices by 2020. IBM states that roughly 785 Cloud apps are in use for the average Enterprise while only 60 of those are actually used on a consistent basis. What does this all mean?

Businesses of all sizes can benefit from having a fully integrated, reliable, secure, and cost-effective hybrid cloud deployment. If you have been tasked with the challenging responsibility of revamping an existing cloud computing strategy or implementing one for a growing business, there are some important best practices to keep in mind.