Ransomware, a type of malicious software or malware, is designed to deny access to computer systems or sensitive data until ransom is paid. While ransomware has been around for decades, ransomware attacks are becoming more sophisticated, spreading through phishing emails, spear phishing, email attachments, vulnerability exploits, computer worms and other attack vectors.
The NIST Cybersecurity Framework provides a framework, based on existing standards, guidelines and practices for private sector organizations in the United States to better manage and reduce cybersecurity risk. In addition to helping organizations prevent, detect and respond to cyber threats and cyber attacks, it was designed to improve cybersecurity and risk management communications among internal and external stakeholders. The framework is increasingly adopted as best practice, with 30% of U.S.
Psychographic data is information about a person's values, attitudes, interests and personality traits that is used to build a profile of how an individual views the world, the things that interest them and what triggers motivate them to action.
The principle of least privilege (POLP), an important concept of computer security, is the practice of limiting access rights for users, accounts and computing processes to only those needed to do the job at hand. Privilege refers to the authorization to bypass certain security restraints. When applied to people, minimal privilege, means enforcing the minimal level of user rights that still allow the user to perform their job function.
A computer worm is a type of malicious software that self-replicates, infecting other computers while remaining active on infected systems. Worms can often go unnoticed until their uncontrolled replication process consumes system resources, halting or slowing the infected computer. Along with computing resources, networks can become congested by traffic associated with worm propagation.
Formulating an IT security risk assessment methodology is a key part of building a robust information security risk management program. The two most popular types of risk assessment methodologies used by assessors are: A risk assessment is a process that aims to identify cybersecurity risks, their sources and how to mitigate them to an acceptable level of risk.
A vendor risk management questionnaire (also known as a third-party risk assessment questionnaire or vendor risk assessment questionnaire) is designed to help your organization identify potential weaknesses among your third-party vendors and partners that could result in a data breach, data leak or other type of cyber attack.
An incident response plan is a set of written instructions that outline your organization's response to data breaches, data leaks, cyber attacks and security incidents. Incident response planning contains specific directions for specific attack scenarios, avoiding further damages, reducing recovery time and mitigating cybersecurity risk. Incident response procedures focus on planning for security breaches and how organization's will recover from them.
DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance) is an email authentication protocol designed to protect your organization's email domain from being used in email spoofing. Email spoofing is often used for social engineering attacks like business email compromise attacks, phishing or spear phishing emails, emails scams and other cyber attacks.
An exploit is a piece of software, data or sequence of commands that takes advantage of a vulnerability to cause unintended behavior or to gain unauthorized access to sensitive data. Once vulnerabilities are identified, they are posted on Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE). CVE is a free vulnerability dictionary designed to improve global cyber security and cyber resilience by creating a standardized identifier for a given vulnerability or exposure.
