When I was a software developer, I never joined any dev communities. I didn’t see the point. I also worked evenings as a professional musician and mostly spent time within the music community and sports groups I was a part of. I spent time with my dev friends at work; I didn’t understand why I would want to know devs with whom I didn’t work. I was a senior dev.
If the last year has taught us anything, “hope for the best and plan for the worst” should be the new mantra of business owners and IT professionals. No one could have predicted the global pandemic that wreaked havoc on industries and businesses around the world; yet, those companies with a business continuity plan were far better off than those without one.
A new year typically brings a renewed sense of optimism; however, 2021 brings with it promises of unparalleled challenges for board members as their role in cyber risk oversight and increasing organizational resilience has never been more important. Over the course of 2020, as organizations shifted already overburdened staff to build capacity to support remote working, threat actors aggressively exploited weaknesses exposed in the transition.
In the past few months, Cyberint has observed a series of suspicious PDF files mentioning different retail brands, scanned to an anti-virus repository. Seeing as the files were flagged as malicious by the repository, Cyberint’s working assumption is that the retailers were mentioned in order to lure their employees or customers into opening the files.
Social media is no stranger to scams. However, recent trends show scammers have started to show more aggression toward businesses since the beginning of the pandemic. Being able to recognize these scams can help you prevent injury to your business.
The Canadian Centre for Cyber Security performs evaluations on common IT products and releases a report called “Common Criteria Certification.” This process allows for organizations to review an evaluation without needing to set up and configure an IT product that they would like to test. Tripwire Enterprise v8.8.2.2 was recently evaluated and passed the certification.
Teramind and InterGuard, both are highly regarded as powerful employee monitoring platforms for the modern workforce. Both of them have strong activity monitoring, productivity analysis and reporting features. Especially, after the recent refresh of its UI, InterGuard has been able to up its game in user friendliness – a big factor for this kind of software. On the other hand, Teramind is already known for its intuitive, award-winning interface.
TeamViewer is a great utility for remotely helping your relatives or for IT people servicing small businesses. But using it in large organizations, and especially for critical infrastructure, is rather risky, as shown in a recent attempt to poison the water of a city in Florida.
A selection of this week’s more interesting vulnerability disclosures and cyber security news. For a daily selection see our twitter feed at #ionCube24. Three quite interesting articles this week. The first is unsettling, if it wasn’t for someone spotting it in progress and was able to counteract the activity, who knows what might have happened. The question is then, who did it?
After dealing with the COVID global pandemic for the past year, it should be no surprise to anyone that working from home can be challenging. These various challenges include distractions, demands, lack of equipment (home wireless was never meant to be loaded the way it is now), and of course: bandwidth challenges.
