Tag: cybersecurity

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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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 Machine Learning Can Help UBA Tools to Thwart Security Attacks

John Ejiofor / March 2, 2020

Image by Tumisu from Pixabay  Inasmuch as cyberattacks have consistently been on the increase, it behooves every partaker in the information security industry to constantly be on the knowhow of relevant tools and techniques that can be deployed to tackle the menace and that makes a case for machine learning-based UBA. Your principal duty as an information security professional, is to understand what’s going on in your environment and this will lead to sinking huge amounts of resources and tools that may include log management, security information and event management (SIEM), and even security operational intelligence.  While all these measures may not have been adequate in making you actually comprehend what’s happening, security user behavioral analytics (UBA) has come to play the role. User behavior analytics is basically employing monitoring systems to track, collect, and assess user data and activities. You can deploy these technologies for the analysis of historical data logs which can include network and authentication logs collected and stored in log management and SIEM systems. This will enable you to identify patterns of traffic caused by user behaviors, that could be normal or malicious.  The essence of UBA systems is fundamentally intended to provide cybersecurity teams with actionable insights. Understandably,…

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Technology

Cybersecurity Measures That Could Have Stopped The Exposure of Four Billion Users’ Records

John Ejiofor / February 1, 2020

Image by Katie White from Pixabay In the face of the multiple waves of cyberattacks that governments, corporations, and individuals suffer almost on a daily basis, it’s very annoying to note that any form of information can still be left unguarded and unsecured despite all the cybersecurity measures that are readily available. That is why the news that personal data relating to 1.2 billion people, including email addresses, phone numbers, and LinkedIn and Facebook profile information, has been leaked online via an open and unsecured Elasticsearch server came as a shock. The said data was uncovered on 16 October 2019 by researchers Bob Diachenko and Vinny Troia of threat intelligence platform Data Viper. Diachenko and Troia were able to access and download the data via a web browser without having to use an ordinary password or any other form of authentication. According to the researchers, the first dataset was discovered to contain, among other things, data on 1.5 billion unique individuals, a billion personal email addresses including work emails for millions of decision-makers in Canada, the UK, and the US, 420 million LinkedIn URLs, a billion Facebook URLs and IDs, over 400 million phone numbers and 200 million valid US mobile phone numbers.…

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Marketing, Technology

Benefits and Risks Associated With Edge Computing

John Ejiofor / October 22, 2019

In 2017, it was discovered that around 10% of enterprise-generated data was being created and processed outside a traditional centralized data center or cloud. By 2025, however, Gartner predicts this figure will reach 75%, this is a clear case that edge computing is gaining steam. For a business to thrive, the outright mindset will be to make huge returns on investment and to this end, it’s expected that there will be concerted efforts at cutting costs especially those that are considered irrelevant. Another way to cut costs is by reducing waste such as is seen in bandwidth and that’s where edge computing comes in. Apart from the pressure on resources that are brought to bear by bandwidths and networks, some other driving forces that are responsible for the expected growth in edge computing include a growing scale of projects, an increase of IoT devices, and the need for quick data analysis across multiple IoT use cases.  If you also consider the fact that Intel founder Gordon Moore, says that by 2040 the world’s energy production will not support our computing capability, you will see a good reason for edge computing coming along to fill any possible void that will be…

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