It’s estimated that 63.5 percent of the world’s total population—or 5.07 billion people—uses the Internet today, with a projected 30.9 billion devices connected to the Internet by 2025. (This means even more proving to CAPTCHAs that we’re not robots–good luck picking out all the fire hydrants in the grids!) With more people working from home, combined with a greater reliance on cloud services and ecommerce, the potential for cyberattacks has never been higher.
Throughout 2022, threat actors have been masquerading as the postal service Singapore Post (SingPost) and one of Singapore’s leading telecommunications companies Singtel. Victims are being targeted by phishing emails that appear to be from Singapore Post or Singtel. In these emails, users were sent messages informing them of fake billing issues or outstanding payments with links to fraudulent websites that asked for their personal information.
Over the winter holidays, Southwest Airlines, one of the U.S.’ largest and most reputable airlines was forced to cancel around 45% of its scheduled flights. It’s difficult to pinpoint the exact reason for this meltdown, but in my opinion this is likely due to outdated infrastructure and IT systems. Other airlines also had to deal with bad weather and holiday traffic, but were not faced with the same level of disruption.
It’s rare that a week goes by without at least one data breach making the news. Criminals are targeting companies of all sizes to see if they can slip past their digital defenses and steal confidential data.
Every year, millions of people make New Year’s resolutions, both personally and professionally, and we all know how difficult resolutions can be to keep. One of the top workplace resolutions cybersecurity professionals are making this year is to pursue security automation initiatives.
I am often struck by the similarities in the skill set required for both parenting and cybersecurity. With children—as with employees—it is much easier to keep everyone safe if you have a little bit of visibility into what’s actually going on. The hardest child to parent effectively is one who shuts themselves away in their bedroom, operating in isolation and giving no clues as to the risks they may be exposing themselves to.
In the language of technology, a sandbox is a safe testing environment that is isolated from the rest of your network or system. Developers use sandboxes to test their code before deployment. In cybersecurity, suspicious and potentially unsafe programs, software, and attachments are executed in sandboxes to detect malware and to avoid any harm implicated by them. The use of a sandbox enables you to safely download, open, examine, or run unknown files, providing an additional layer of security.
CISOs – the senior level executives responsible for developing and implementing cybersecurity programs for corporations and other organizations – are not happy campers these days. And it’s not just because they are chronically understaffed and under constant pressure.
