Data Privacy Day (DPD) is January 28. Sounds exciting, right? I’m sure you’ve got the pinata stuffed and the presents on the way.

January 28 is Data Privacy Day (DPD)! I know, you’re so excited that you’ve got a party planned to get your executives, Marketing and Sales personnel to spend all day reviewing and revising your Privacy Policy (especially now that Privacy Shield is invalid). The general focus of DPD is to inform consumers about the need to maintain the privacy of their data and to assist them in this quest.

Is your system 100% ready to face the severest cyber-attack and mitigate the risk of a possible data breach? If you are unsure about your cyber-safety structure, then it’s time to upgrade it. Otherwise, you could be at risk of lengthy legal battles that result in hefty fines. Beyond that, the cost in terms of reputational loss could be catastrophic if not handled meticulously by professionals within a reasonable time.

In the digital age, organizations and the missions and business processes they support rely on information technology and information systems to achieve their mission and business objectives. Not only is technology used to efficiently enable businesses to carry out operational activities, but it is also the backbone for the United States’ critical infrastructure.

The North American Electric Reliability Corporation Critical Infrastructure Protection (NERC CIP) Standards are a cybersecurity compliance framework designed to protect utility organizations. Adhering to these guidelines is essential—falling short will leave your environment vulnerable to malicious actors and can result in some hefty fines.

Most security breaches are the result of one thing: sloppy password practices. Too many people make the mistake of choosing weak passwords, or reusing passwords that they have used elsewhere on the internet – making life too easy for malicious hackers trying to gain unauthorised access.

As we say goodbye to 2020 and spend time reflecting on the industry changes, reassess our workflows and procedures in order to identify where 2021 will bring us, it’s a brilliant time to also address our security practices and ways we can bring improvement to those, as well. After considering the top challenges I saw with development teams and security teams within development environments, I came up with a list of ways to focus our security improvements for 2021.

‘Business’ is a verb that practically means the movement of data. If you aren’t sharing data – keeping the books, sharing ideas and stats about sales, getting the correct information regarding the customer or data to the customer – then you aren’t doing much business. But organizations need to protect their data along the way. Infosec has so many ways of protecting those sources of data, so much so that users of the data often complain.

A few years ago, I worked alongside some oil commodity traders. Environmental concerns aside, I never realized how many parts were required to get the oil out of the ground, not to mention everything else that finally resulted in the production of refined products that surround our lives. As a cybersecurity professional, I was more interested in how all the pipelines were intertwined and, of course, protected.

The U.S Government released on January 5, 2021, a cybersecurity plan to secure the nation’s maritime sector against cybersecurity threats that could endanger national security.