NewCloud Blog

Making decisions about business continuity (BC) and disaster recovery (DR) can be a CIO’s worst nightmare. Planning, implementing and testing a strategy can take months and sleepless nights. Additionally, some CIOs face the added struggle of small budgets, fewer resources, and a mandate for agility to remain competitive. Add them all up, and you get an extremely difficult task.

But taking on the difficult task is far better than waking up one morning to discover a disaster has struck and you were unprepared. 

You’re in an area, maybe it’s a park, a coffeeshop, a hotel, a mall, or somewhere else. You open your laptop or phone to get some work done but you hit a roadblock – you don’t have an internet connection and you don’t know what the password is to the public Wi-Fi network (if there is one). But you also see one or two networks that aren’t password protected just waiting to be used. Your mouse hover over the “connect” button. After all, what harm can an unsecure network do?

As businesses increasingly conduct transactions online, their confidential information is at constant risk of theft or corruption. Cybercriminals spend a lot of time and money looking for ways to access this information for a variety of reasons.  Businesses that have their network successfully breached and their data accessed can suffer a number of adverse consequences such as financial loss, loss of customer confidence, and possible legal actions.

If you take a look at the number of tabs open in your browser, you might realize that you have way more open than you’re actually using. Some might open automatically when you open a link, whereas others may be older tabs that you haven’t closed yet. Most of us don’t pay too much attention to our open tabs as we browse, and with the evolution of browsers, operating systems, and computer hardware, our computers become more capable of handling activities such as having a dozen web pages open simultaneously.

With the many, many different types of cyberattacks out there, it is easy to forget about or be unaware of the lesser known ways that your data could become compromised. Being unaware and uninformed about types attacks can leave you vulnerable to that exact attack. Researching the different types of network attacks has the potential to save your business from ransomware and other serious breaches. 

Some cyberattacks can be fairly easy to notice. A phishing email might be identified by the sender address, formatting, or the address of a link, while vishing could be identified by someone asking prying questions over the phone. Some attacks, however, may be tougher to spot. There are a few types of these, one of the most notable being pharming.

Technology is a constantly changing industry. That is one of the things that makes a career in tech so exciting and appealing. It’s one of the things that keeps employees coming through the doors from 9-to-5, Monday to Friday. In fact, jobs in the tech industry and information technology are predicted to grow by around 12% from 2018 to 2028 with Information Security jobs increasing by 32% overall. This is obviously much faster than most other industries.

You’ve probably heard of phishing, the infamous practice by which a hacker may try to trick you into giving away sensitive information via email. However, there is much more to phishing than just a suspicious email here or there; as individuals and businesses become more savvy about threats like those that may come via email, cybercriminals expand their arsenal of tools to cost you precious time and money. One example of this is smishing.

Did you know that, outside of the US government, the healthcare industry holds more personal data about the general public than any other business entity?

Everything from Social Security numbers to medical records to payment details are held by healthcare providers. If the information stored by these businesses were hacked, it would jeopardize the integrity of the healthcare industry and the livelihood of millions of Americans. As cyberattacks rise in the healthcare industry, this risk has become even greater.

Over the past several years, there has been a significant rise in the number as well as the severity of cyberattacks that have taken place. As businesses increasingly conduct their transactions online, cybercriminals, as well as other malicious actors accordingly, invest their time and resources to compromise business networks and access private data for their nefarious purposes. So far this year, data breaches and cyberattacks have cost businesses an average of $3.92 million; this is a 1.5 percent increase from 2018 and a 12 percent increase from 2014 when the cost of a data breach was approximately $3.5 million.