Month: April 2020

Healthcare, Technology

Cybersecurity: The Flip Side of The Coronavirus Pandemic

John Ejiofor / April 30, 2020

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay There were insinuations that coronavirus was an accident from a laboratory in Wuhan that was studying bat coronaviruses and then spread to the public, though, this has been debunked by the WHO. If indeed it had been, then the persons behind the evil plan did not take a lot of things including the cybersecurity impact into cognizance. What would it have been like if, for an accident, the whole world was thrown into this mammoth amount of cybersecurity threats and attacks we have been experiencing? Sherrod DeGrippo, senior director of threat research and detection at Proofpoint was reported to have observed that the total volume of phishing emails and other security threats as a consequence of the coronavirus pandemic now represents the largest coalescing of cyberattack types around a single issue that has been seen globally and maybe for a long time to come. Check Point Threat Intelligence, revealed that since January 2020, there have been over 4,000 coronavirus-related domains registered globally. While 3% of the websites were found to be malicious, an additional 5% are suspicious.  Check Point Threat Intelligence also pointed out based on hindsight that coronavirus-related domains are 50% more likely to be malicious…

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Healthcare, Technology

Was The World Short-changed by AI For COVID-19?

John Ejiofor / April 20, 2020

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay  COVID-19 came hitting hard at the very fabric of our culture, we were ill-prepared for it. Billions of people worldwide are under lockdown, thousands have died, and more are still dying.  Globally, governments, businesses, and individuals are confused, facing an uncertain economic future. Without mincing words, the world was completely unprepared for COVID-19 despite our technological advancements in the areas of AI and machine learning, hence, we are suffering the consequences and direly so.  It is on record that an artificial intelligence company called BlueDot was the first to notice that something weird was going on and, therefore, went ahead to alert the world of a cluster of “unusual pneumonia” cases occurring around a market in Wuhan, China, about the midnight of December 30, 2019. The company likened the symptoms to those of the SARS, an outbreak that was experienced in 2003. Incidentally, before the World Health Organization (WHO) or the Chinese authorities eventually got around to informing us nearly a week after the emergence of COVID-19, it was late and the harm had been done. The question is, how did we get it wrong?  It would have been expected that since we have progressed so much…

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Technology

How You Can Best Help The Workforce in The Coronavirus Crisis

John Ejiofor / April 17, 2020

Photo Credit: U.S. Pacific Fleet Flickr via Compfight cc IT leaders are known to always be on the hot seat, working under pressure, but the coronavirus pandemic has taken it to another dimension altogether. Being in charge of technology for your organization has always not been easy as you don’t know when a serious crisis is brewing but what we have currently is that everybody was hit at the same time with little or no room for preparedness.  Everybody is right now trying to work remotely as a result of the coronavirus pandemic. There is no doubt that the transition in working habits that are bordered on technology and culture must have to be going through a lot of stress and you need to put in place a huge amount of effective change management in these very tough circumstances.  How are you going to handle the fact that people must work from environments not conducive to work? There must be constraints in the workspace, some people may need to work from home where there are kids especially now that schools are closed due to the coronavirus pandemic.  You must have been having difficulties focusing on the mental well-being of your…

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Technology

How a Cyber-attack Could be Your Launchpad

John Ejiofor / April 13, 2020

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay In most organizations, the CISO has always been at the receiving end of any cyber-attack while this may seem to be the ideal thing to do, it is not always the right thing and the fact of it all is that in the overall, the CISO may even use the experience garnered from such an attack to update. It’s highly probable that having been the victim of a cyber-attack may actually go a long way in enhancing your CV. In the cybersecurity world, the past decade has been fraught with questions on whom to blame over a data breach or cyber incident. When such things happen, the victims usually want to hold somebody accountable for their perceived loss which should be expected.  What, however, happens in most cases is that chief information security officers (CISOs) and chief information officers (CIOs) are given the boot, occasionally, the CEO is shown the door too. While these actions may placate the aggrieved, it’s not always correct that their actions or inactions are directly responsible for the breaches. A situation that quickly comes to mind is that of one of the world’s biggest credit score agencies, Equifax, that experienced a catastrophic…

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Marketing

7 POWERFUL B2B LEAD GENERATION TIPS

John Ejiofor / April 8, 2020

Photo Credit: verchmarco Flickr via Compfight cc Are you an entrepreneur, marketer or sales active in B2B? Then an important part of your job without any doubt is lead generation. No business without leads, right?  Of course, you also want your product, service, and organization to be known to your potential customer and to know what you stand for. But for many B2B companies, lead generation is priority number 1. However, generating valuable B2B leads is not easy in this world of ‘information obesity’. Or is it? With the 7 powerful B2B lead generation tips in this blog, you at least significantly increase your chances. 1. Make personal contact as much as possible 2. Harness the power of live chat 3. Use marketing automation 4. Convert your website visitors into leads 5. Start giving 6. Make your best customers your best ambassadors 7. Get more online reviews 1. Make personal contact as much as possible Of course, it is easy to send an email or app with questions from potential customers. But it is also an opportunity to make better and more personal contact.  If a physical appointment takes too much time or is not yet opportune, you can also…

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Technology

Capitalizing on Risk Assessment Analysis and BIA for More Precise and Focused BC Plans

John Ejiofor / April 3, 2020

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay  It’s quite true that the process involved in the development of business continuity and disaster recovery plans go through a lot of stages, but you can’t kick start them without taking into cognizance the vital contributions of BIA (business impact analysis) and risk assessment analysis. Once you have taken the two into consideration, you can then go ahead to formulate strategies that will enable you to handle the various hazards, risks, possible perils, and threats to critical business processes identified in the BIA and risk assessment analysis.  If you are able to accomplish this, what you come up with is a completed business continuity plan. It’s important that you focus on the relationship between business impact analysis and risk assessment analysis, in order to fully comprehend the highly important process of developing business continuity/disaster recovery strategies, for you to eventually build your watertight BC/DR plans. BIA data The areas you can deploy the results of a BIA to identify include:  The most crucial business functions and processes to be recovered and reestablished after you might have experienced a disruptive event. Resources your organization needs to effectively sustain your key operations, such as email, a suite of office…

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