Data privacy: What your employees don’t know but should

What do employees in your organization understand about security, data privacy, and compliance? According to a recent report from Bothell, Wash.-based MediaPro, perhaps not as much as they should. With data privacy fast becoming a hot-button issue, and the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) right around the corner, what your employees don’t know…

Tracking Malicious Insiders: Catch Me If You Can

The idea of malicious insiders stealing valuable assets brings to mind a picture of masked men breaking into a bank vault or museum and making a getaway with their illicit stash. But what if the enemy is one of us — someone who knows exactly where we keep our most valuable items, how we safeguard…

Road Trip or Road Rash? Compliance, Meet Security

I’ve been on the road a lot lately. Literally, I’ve been in the car, traveling along every kind of road, alongside virtually every type of vehicle you can imagine. And I sometimes found myself noticing things about the people who were driving all those cars, trucks and motorcycles. The motorcyclists were the ones I found…

Thanatos Ransomware Makes Data Recovery Impossible

A newly discovered ransomware family is generating a different encryption key for each of the encrypted files but saves none of them, thus making data recovery impossible. Dubbed Thanatos, the malware was discovered by MalwareHunterTeam and already analyzed by several other security researchers. When encrypting files on a computer, the malware appends the .THANATOS extension…

NoMoreRansom: Free Decryption for Latest Cryakl Ransomware

Decryption keys for a current version of Cryakl ransomware have been obtained and uploaded to the NoMoreRansom website. Victims of Cryakl can potentially recover encrypted files with the Rakhni Decryptor available for free from Kaspersky Lab or NoMoreRansom. NoMoreRansom is a collaborative public/private project launched by Europol, the Dutch National Police, Kaspersky Lab and McAfee in July 2016….

Data Encryption: 4 Common Pitfalls

To maximize encryption effectiveness you must minimize adverse effects in network performance and complexity. Here’s how. Employing data encryption is a no-brainer, as it supports the defense-in-depth strategy that organizations must embrace to stop bad actors from accessing sensitive network files. However, outside of the extra layers of protection data encryption can provide, there are also tradeoffs…

Breach-Proofing Your Data in a GDPR World

The massive data breaches that have hit the headlines in recent years, including Yahoo, Verizon, and particularly Equifax, have taken a toll on breach victims, consumers, and corporations. We’ve seen stocks drop precipitously, class-action lawsuits filed, CEOs shown the door, and executives called before Congress. This year, breaches could be even more costly for companies…

In Case of Emergency, Break Glass: Protecting User Credentials in the Event of a Data Breach

There have been countless cyberbreaches over the past few years in which personal data, such as user IDs and passwords, have been compromised. These range from attacks against government agencies, such as two recent incidents affecting the national identity systems in Spain and Estonia, to corporate breaches exposing data belonging to millions of customers. In…