Passwords are bad, and our whole industry is trying to move away from these simple strings granting access to our systems. But change is slow, and adopting newer standards is difficult, even if passwords are deeply problematic. Now, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is updating the core standard for authentication – and it adopts the “new school” of password policies.

In today's complicated digital world, cyber threats are always coming at companies. Organizations need to do regular penetration testing to find security holes and evaluate their security stance in order to protect their valuable assets and keep their operations running smoothly. Having a named penetration test point of contact (PTPOC) is a key part of any penetration test that goes well.

On October 9, 2024, the Australian government took a significant step in fortifying its cyber defenses by introducing the Cyber Security Bill 2024 to Parliament. This pioneering legislation marks the country's first standalone cybersecurity law, designed to enhance protections for both citizens and organizations amid escalating geopolitical and cyber threats. By implementing comprehensive measures, Australia aims to safeguard critical infrastructure and ensure a more secure digital environment.

In a significant breach, over 10 million customer conversations from an AI-powered call center platform in the Middle East have been exposed. This incident has raised alarm bells regarding the security vulnerabilities of AI platforms widely used in sectors such as fintech and e-commerce. As AI platforms become integral to business operations, the risks of compromised data tracking and brand impersonation have also escalated.

Microsoft is currently investigating a significant issue affecting its Outlook desktop app, with users experiencing a range of problems, including crashes, high memory consumption, and login failures. Initially believed to impact only European users, the issue has now been reported by users globally, signaling a more widespread problem. In addition to the desktop app, some users have experienced similar issues while using Outlook on the web (OWA), making this a pressing matter for Microsoft to address.

The privileged accounts in your IT environment require special attention because they have elevated access to vital systems and sensitive data. The organization can suffer severe damage if they are misused by their owners or compromised in attacks. In addition, many compliance standards require organizations to maintain tight control over privileged access. Most organizations have hundreds or thousands of accounts with privileged access.

Think of a port as a virtual gateway that a specific service, process, or application on your computer uses for network communication. Each port is assigned a unique number, allowing different types of traffic to be directed to the appropriate software. For example, your email might use one port, while your web browsing uses another. When combined with an IP address, a port number creates a complete socket address, enabling precise routing of data to and from your computer across the network.

We are so proud to announce that GitProtect Backup and Disaster Recovery for Azure DevOps is here! The 1.8.5 release also brings a few improvements – performance, UX, and more – and small fixes. Let’s dig into more details.

According to Cybersecurity Ventures, more than half of the world’s data will be stored in the cloud by 2025. With this growth comes a new challenge: understanding where your cloud data lives, what it contains, and how to ensure it is properly protected. The mass storage capabilities of the cloud means it’s easy to drop data wherever you want. It’s also easy to forget to clean up that data or set up backups where that data is required.

Virtualization offers several advantages for backup and recovery operations, which are the backbone of data protection, operational continuity, and availability. Most importantly, virtualization makes agentless and image-based, host-level backups possible. These types of backups can capture the full VM, including VM configuration as well as VM data. However, it’s important to protect hosts too, as healthy ESXi hosts are important for VMs to run properly.