Secure Data While Traveling It is a persistent belief that only large and prominent organizations become targets for hackers. Unfortunately, that is not always the case. Hackers also often target small and medium-sized businesses because they generally have weaker security practices as well as business relations with larger enterprises. For example, the 2013 data breach that exposed the credit card data of more than 40 million Target accounts began when hackers infiltrated the systems of…

What are rootkits? A rootkit is designed to hide the telltale signs that an operating system has been compromised. Rootkits, in other words, allow viruses and malware to disguise themselves as necessary files so that antivirus programs can overlook them. Rootkits enable a third party to remotely maintain command of a computer, without the original user’s knowledge. Furthermore, a rootkit can remotely execute programs and change system configurations from the host machine. A rootkit-infected computer…

WHY THEY ARE IMPORTANT Businesses continue to fail to set strong passwords, and as a result, 80% of hack-related breaches are through stolen passwords or weak and guessable passwords.1 59% of small businesses continue to have no visibility into employees’ password practices.2 As a result, employees fail to use strong passwords or they share passwords with others. Another prevalent problem is that sixty-eight percent of small businesses do not strictly enforce password policies. Thus, employees…

Data is one of the most important assets for any organization. It is also extremely important for a business to classify its data. According to Varonis, data classification is the process of analyzing structured or unstructured data, and then organizing it into categories that are based on file type, contents, and other metadata (data that gives information on other data).1 Data classification often involves a multitude of different tags and labels. These tags and labels…

Why is it important to protect personal information?  Basically, it will cost your business more money if you don’t safeguard that information, than it does to actually safeguard that information in the first place. In California, any business that computerizes data that includes protected personal information will have to disclose, in the event of a data breach, what data was stolen to every Californian resident that was affected.  The breach notice must be made as…