November and December can be particularly stressful for retail organizations—and not just because of the holiday madness. As the volume of transactions ramps up during the holiday season, IT teams must be on high alert for threats buried in a sea of routine activity. But given the exponential growth of ecommerce, they also need to stave off cyber threats.

One of my favorite books is “Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage” by Alfred Lansing. I encourage you to read it if you haven’t. Here is a brief synopsis of the true-to-life story: In August 1914, polar explorer Ernest Shackleton boarded his ship, the Endurance, and set sail for Antarctica, where he planned to cross the last uncharted continent on foot.

A security operations center (SOC) is a centralized facility that unifies an organization’s security monitoring across all IT infrastructure. SOCs function as a hub for information security personnel and the processes and technology needed to detect, monitor, and remediate cyber threats through real-time data analysis.

Get ready for upcoming changes to cyber insurance policies. Due to risk associated with the increase in remote work, insurers are more likely to initiate in-depth cybersecurity risk analyses of companies seeking to purchase or renew policies, the Wall Street Journal reports. The adoption of stringent privacy regulations in the United States and abroad could also justify additional scrutiny by insurance companies during the initial underwriting and renewal process.

While data breaches are never good news for any business, they can be especially catastrophic in the financial industry. The sheer amount of sensitive personal data that moves through the average banking institution on a normal day creates a seductive target for cybercriminals and a potential nightmare for security administrators. As a result, finding the right cybersecurity solution that can be tailored to the needs of financial institutions a must.

Global organizations are working towards making data privacy a fundamental right. However, as the privacy paradigm shifts to a digital world, businesses are more exposed than ever before. That’s because security has not been the focus of this revolution in IT infrastructure.

Arctic Wolf security awareness program experts—who created security awareness programs for Disney, Sony, as well as our Managed Security Awareness solution—recently produced The Complete Security Awareness Plan and Strategy Guide to help you evaluate and elevate your own security awareness program.

October marked a dubious milestone for cybersecurity. A report from the Identity Theft Research Center confirmed that the number of cyber attacks reported through the first nine months of the year exceeded the total recorded for the entirety of 2020. And not by a small margin either—attacks are up 17% in 2021 compared to last year. Clearly, hackers have been busy, as have the cybersecurity experts tasked with mitigating the damage.

In the second half of 2021 the AT&T Managed Threat Detection and Response (MTDR) security operations center (SOC) observed an increasing number of attacks against vulnerable Exchange servers. A number of these attacks were attempting to leverage proxyshell vulnerability to gain access to customer’s networks.

This week marks our mid-year kick-off. It’s our all-company meeting that, like Arctic Wolf, gets bigger each year with hundreds of new team members joining us from around the world—many for the first time. With so much new hiring (we’re on pace to nearly double ourselves, again), I’m continually reminded of our Wolf Pack’s talent, dedication, and drive for success, and I’m proud to work alongside these professionals daily.