Tag: cybercriminals

Technology

5 Tips for a Cyber Secure Home Experience

John Ejiofor / October 24, 2020

Image by Pete Linforth from Pixabay  What Is Cybersecurity? Cybersecurity is referred to as the body of technologies and practices used to protect networks, data, and programs from attacks or unauthorized access. As the world is slowly becoming utterly dependent on technology, cybersecurity is required to safeguard all the information that travels through the internet. For instance, the digital economy accounted for 6.9 percent of the U.S. gross domestic product, or $1.35 trillion, in 2017, according to statistics released by the Bureau of Economic Analysis.  The government, military, and other organizations collect data from us, which might have sensitive information that can negatively empower unauthorized access. Unauthorized access to any device can use all your company’s sensitive data and business, and can also cause serious devastation.  Cybersecurity is, therefore, essential to protect all the sensitive data of your company or a business. Cybercrime has increased nowadays, as many people do not have a secure network connection, making it easily accessible by cyber attackers. The World Economic Forum reports that in 2019, four new malware samples were created every second.  This lack of a secure network has given cybercriminals the undue advantage to attack a company’s employees and get access to the company’s database. …

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Healthcare, Technology

Coronavirus: Where The World Got it All Wrong

John Ejiofor / August 17, 2020

Image by cromaconceptovisual from Pixabay Coronavirus has succeeded in exposing inadequacies and shortcomings in our daily lives. As a result of the inadequacies, billions of people worldwide were under lockdown, thousands have died, and more are still dying.  Governments, businesses, and individuals have been thrown into confusion, facing an uncertain economic future. The world, whether developing or developed, was completely unprepared for COVID-19 despite our technological advancements in the areas of AI and machine learning, hence, we are suffering the consequences direly.  The coronavirus pandemic also exposed our ill-preparedness in how we have been handling our supply chains as well as security and privacy. A rundown of the following three very important sectors will bring to light where we failed and also a pointer as to what needs to be done since this may not be the last time we will be facing viral diseases. Technological advancement BlueDot, an artificial intelligence company, was able to notice that something ominous was in the offing 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…

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Technology

Cybersecurity: How the “New Normal” Can Impact Your Business

John Ejiofor / July 1, 2020

Image by Katie White from Pixabay  With attempts at easing lockdowns globally and an envisaged victory over the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s proper to take into cognizance the cybersecurity impact on your business. Expectations are rife that after the victory the world is heading into a “new normal” in the way society will be organized and the way business will be conducted.  While the main preoccupation of individuals as the COVID-19 pandemic raged on has been how to protect themselves and their families from the virus and how to hold on to their jobs, for business owners, it has been a different ball game altogether. You must have focused on how to beat the pandemic without doing irreversible damage to your economy in the process. This could have led you to take all sorts of decisions that included remote working, telemedicine, outsourcing, and online marketing. All these measures taken to sustain the life of your business are in order, but you probably didn’t take the cybersecurity risks involved into consideration. As the world is grappling and fighting to overcome the pandemic, it’s expected that a “new normal” way of conducting businesses and even living, will be the order of the day. Measures such as…

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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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Technology

How to Win the Ever-Changing Threats of the Cyberwar

John Ejiofor / February 12, 2020

Image by Clker-Free-Vector-Images from Pixabay  Based on the volume, frequency, and dastardness of attacks launched by cybercriminals, it is no longer a hidden fact that the world is in for a cyberwar. The magnitude of the war has made it absolutely imperative that we must embark on building nation-level defenses to fight cyberwar.  It may have been a bit late already but it can never be an overstatement to say that nation-states should put their acts together, fashion out well-articulated cyber defense measures to be able to protect themselves from the most advanced threats ever seen. Looking at the strategies cybercriminals have employed in launching attacks we have experienced so far, we may be at the early stages yet.  It is a cyberwar  Cyber threats and cyberattacks did not just start to manifest yesterday, however, the worldwide gruesome WannaCry and NotPeyta ransomware attacks of 2017, brought cyberattacks to a new level altogether. As if that were not a notification that we the world is grappling with something very mammoth, the expanding levels of malware-related data breaches in 2018, are sheer warnings and realities of the increasingly critical, vulnerable, and fast-developing world of cybercrime we all live and conduct business activities in.  Governments, individuals,…

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Technology

Facial Recognition Could be The Next Access Point For Hackers

John Ejiofor / May 26, 2019

Facial recognition, a form of biometric technology is a biological measurement — or physical characteristic — that can be used to identify individuals. Researchers claim the shape of an ear, the way someone sits and walks, unique body odors, the veins in one’s hands, and even facial contortions are other unique identifiers. Because physical characteristics are relatively fixed and individualized — even in the case of twins — they are being used to replace or at least augment password systems for computers, phones, and restricted access rooms and buildings. Biometrics scanners are becoming increasingly sophisticated. For example, Apple’s iPhone X  which operates on the facial recognition technology incidents 30,000 infrared dots onto a user’s face in order to create a sequence of reflections which produce information about the 3D shape of the face, substantiating the user by pattern matching. The chance of mistaken identity is one in a million, according to Apple. This technological advancement should be a thing of joy as it’s supposed to go a long way in easing us of the constant worries of having to remember our passwords and also being very careful not to mistakenly drop them for cybercriminals. It is on record that in…

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