On May 7, 2021, Colonial Pipeline, Co. was forced to close operations after a ransomware hack was confirmed to have breached their systems. This attack hindered services to the East-coast of the United States and sparked fears of a massive gas shortage to American motorists. This hack greatly compromised Colonial Pipeline’s system integrity and put private data at risk.
Since the COVID-19 outbreak in January 2020 and pandemic declaration in late March, organizations and federal agencies have been scrambling to secure their systems and create remote work contingency plans to keep continuity for their business matters.
The protection of employee and consumer data has become a priority for companies and organizations, especially with the ever-increasing potential for liability due to the use of new technologies. The collection and management of data require a broad range of legal compliance activities. It is essential to prioritize and protect sensitive, confidential, and proprietary information. Data breaches or losses can have a substantial adverse effect on a company’s financials and reputation. This article discusses several privacy laws expected to guide organizations in the protection of their information assets, and the privacy rights of individuals, through compliance.
Social engineering is an attack mechanism majorly aimed at misleading employees or individuals to hand over relevant information for the attacker’s financial gain. Social engineering attacks are launched mostly via email, social media, and over the phone.
Ransomware has become one of the most pressing and expensive cybersecurity threats in recent years. According to Cybersecurity Ventures, a ransomware attack happens every 14 seconds, resulting in damage costs amounting up to $11.5 billion. These numbers are only predicted to increase the more daring cybercriminals become.
The monumental success of the semi-automated facial recognition traces its roots back in the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department in 1988. Detectives used composite drawings of suspects and ran them through the very first system deployed to the Lakewood Division, in hopes that the digitized mugshots in their database would reveal who their prime suspect would be.
Modern cyberattacks frequently target companies with large data holdings. Last year, Equifax, a credit reporting agency that collects information on nearly 800 million individuals and 88 million businesses worldwide, fell victim to a massive attack that compromised the personal information of 150 million customers. Just earlier this year, GitHub, a major online software development platform, suffered from a DDoS attack that overloaded their servers with simultaneous online traffic of 1.35 TB per second. Attacks such as these are increasingly frequent and are often used to steal valuable customer data from companies. In response to this growing threat, blockchain technology is now being implemented by some companies.
Application security needs more attention as there is an increasing usage of applicationson smart devices. While security has seen improvements over the years, applications still have vulnerabilities that can expose them to spyware, keyloggers, viruses, worms, and other harmful scripts.
Conducting business online opens several opportunities but also poses risks. Earlier this year, hundreds of companies had data breaches, exposing sensitive information of clients and employees.
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