Recent findings report that on average, 96 percent of systems across all industry segments have been breached. While you should absolutely update your information security system and protocols to provide the best protection you can for your data, you should also know how to spot a data breach. Unfortunately the odds of escaping one aren’t in your favor, but you can increase your chances of spotting a breach quickly and containing any damage.

In May 2017, the Equifax data breach compromised critical credit and identity data for 56 percent of American adults, 15 million UK citizens and 20,000 Canadians. The Ponemon Institute estimates that the total cost to Equifax could approach $600M in direct expenses and fines. That doesn’t include the cost of the security upgrades required to bring its IT system up to date.

A selection of this week’s more interesting vulnerability disclosures and cyber security news. While a quiet week in regards to note worthy news, there has been some interesting, and quite starling ones nevertheless. The first, and quite a nasty shock I imagine.

67% of small and micro businesses have experienced a cyber attack, while 58% have experienced a data breach within the last 12 months, according to a study conducted by the Ponemon Institute. Cybersecurity has become one of the major questions that plague the 21st century, with numerous businesses reporting significant losses resulting from loss of private customer data, denial of service (DoS) attacks.

For continuous coverage, we push out major Detectify security updates every two weeks, keeping our tool up-to-date with new findings, features and improvements sourced from our security researchers and Crowdsource ethical hacker community. Due to confidentially agreements, we cannot publicize all security update releases here but they are immediately added to our scanner and available to all users. This post highlights a few things that we have improved in the last two weeks.

If you’ve been online recently, you may have read the news about hackers demanding a ransom from Dublin’s tram system. Visitors to the Luas website were greeted by the hackers’ message threatening to publish the stolen information unless they were paid one Bitcoin (approximately 3,300 Euros or US $3,800). While the message itself appeared to be harmless, the fact is that the hackers could just as easily have used the domain to spread malware or phishing attempts.

January 15, 2019 Miamisburg, OH – Ignyte Assurance PlatformTM, an industry leader in managing governance, risk and compliance (GRC), has received $100,000 from the state of Ohio to develop and integrate cybersecurity technology from the Air Force Research Laboratory. The company will use the funding to develop and integrate cybersecurity technology from the Air Force Research Laboratory to improve data collection and analysis.

The alphabet soup of cybersecurity includes standards and regulations such as ISO, COBIT, COSO, NIST, NY DFS, and GDPR. While some industries must meet regulatory compliance requirements, other businesses need to choose a standard to which they align their cybersecurity controls. With that in mind, you may want to select the most user-friendly information technology security standard to help management and your IT department create a risk-based program.

Every day, as a part of my work at AlienVault, I talk to prospective clients. Many of them are trying to put together a security plan for their business. Most of the people I talk to are IT professionals who, like everyone else, are learning as they go.