Cybersecurity breaches and regulatory compliance are this year’s themes. Marriott was sued and fined $124 million for their data breach back in 2014, according to The Wall Street Journal. Capital One leaked 100 million credit applications including Social Security Numbers. Both LabCorp and Quest Diagnostics exposed millions of patients’ medical records.

Deepfakes are the latest moral panic, but the issues about consent, fake news, and political manipulation they raise are not new. They are also not issues that can be solved at a tech level. A deepfake is essentially a video of something that didn’t happen, but made to look extremely realistic. That might sound like a basic case of ‘photoshopping’, but deepfakes go way beyond this.

When malware sneaks inside your network, it needs to communicate back to the internet whether to exfiltrate sensitive datasets it found, accept commands of its evil masters or even simply let them know it has successfully infiltrated your infrastructure (with ransomware being one of the rare exceptions that doesn’t need such connection).

Cybersecurity and cyber security awareness are critical to business survival in an era dominated by growing virtual crime. It might be true that most people know about costly identity theft and reputation-destroying network hacks. Organizations spend millions every year trying to defend themselves against cybercrime, but still, attacks seem to be more and more successful.

As someone who has worked for their entire career in the Managed Network Services space, if I had to pick out, over the past five years, two of the most impactful shifts in managing technology, it would be a shift from traditional, in-house servers to solutions where 3rd parties build “clouds” to provide similar business functions as well as the increased pressure on organizations to have comprehensive cyber-security strategies as threats become more significant.

A selection of this week’s more interesting vulnerability disclosures and cyber security news. Such an amazing choice of juicy news articles this week! I will skip the seriously weird and rapidly escalating circumstances of the Capital One breach, and instead dive into the some of the more low key, but nevertheless interesting items. First up, and for those of you who post infosec articles, something you will understand: stock photos.

Cybersecurity risk is the probability of a cyber attack or data breach on your organization. Organizations are becoming more vulnerable to cyber threats due to the increasing reliance on computers, networks, programs, social media and data globally. Data breaches, a common cyber attack, have massive negative business impact and often arise from insufficiently protected data.