It should be no surprise that the costs associated with a corporate data breach can be high. (The average total cost is now nearly $5 million, according to IBM.) What may be more alarming is the average length of time it takes for businesses to recover from a breach – and what that means for their security teams, business operations, and bottom line.

The adoption of cloud services and the shift to remote work have rapidly expanded the attack surface. In many ways, identities are arguably now at the frontier of cybersecurity – which means traditional identity and access management (IAM) approaches are increasingly inadequate. Cyberattacks are also growing in sophistication, in part through exploiting vulnerabilities in the traditional, fragmented IAM systems that many companies are still using.

In our hyper-connected reality, software applications are the unsung heroes of business operations. But, let's face it, with great tech comes great vulnerability to cyber shakedowns and data leaks. This begs the question: “Is scanning enough to manage risk?” Organizations are playing a high-stakes game of keeping their apps secure to safeguard their secrets.

ReliaQuest warns that the BlackBasta ransomware gang is using new social engineering tactics to obtain initial access within corporate networks. The threat actor begins by sending mass email spam campaigns targeting employees, then adding people who fall for the emails to Microsoft Teams chats with external users. These external users pose as IT support or help desk staff, and send employees Microsoft Teams messages containing malicious QR codes.

Attackers are abusing Eventbrite’s scheduling platform to send phishing emails, according to researchers at Perception Point. These attacks increased by 900% between July and October 2024. “Perception Point researchers observed phishing emails delivered via ‘noreply@events.eventbritecom,’” the researchers write.

89% of organizations suffered at least one security incident in the past three years, according to The 2024 State of Secure Infrastructure Access, a new survey of 250 security and engineering leaders. The rise of cloud computing, the surge of identity-based attacks, and increasing regulatory compliance concerns have forced companies to rethink how they handle security, productivity, and compliance.

If you think you’ve accidentally opened a phishing PDF, it’s important to immediately disconnect your device from the internet, back up your files, run a virus scan on your device and change your passwords. Typically, you can spot a phishing attempt if an email contains urgent and threatening language, too-good-to-be-true offers, spelling and grammatical errors or requests for private information.

Yes, viruses can come from a PDF by hiding in malicious code. A virus is a type of malware, which is malicious software intended to infect your device and steal private data. A virus can infect your device only if you interact with it, which could happen by opening a PDF containing a virus. Since PDFs are so widely used, hackers can hide viruses within innocent-looking files to jeopardize your privacy.