The day after Thanksgiving, widely referred to as Black Friday, has marked the start of the Christmas shopping season since 1952. Surprisingly, it wasn’t until 2012 that the Black Friday buzz was adapted to further stoke the shopping fire by promoting Cyber Monday. Whether shoppers choose to chase the deals in person or from the privacy of their own homes, personal information is being shared in the form of email addresses, home addresses, and credit card numbers. As the stores are preparing by stocking shelves and bulking up employee headcount, cyber criminals are also preparing to capitalize on the shopping frenzy, hoping to catch consumers with their guards down.
Appalachia Technologies Blog
Appalachia Technologies team is comprised of a diverse mix of IT professionals, some of whom have been on the forefront of IT since the industry’s inception. Through the years, our team has developed a wide array of experience in understanding individual needs and how they relate to your business.
One of the great “must reads” for us cybersecurity wonks is the annual DBIR (Data Breach and Incident Response), issued by Verizon every year since 2008. While never dull, the DBIR is not a light read and comes in at a meaty 115 pages this year. While we at Appalachia are delighted to stuff our horns with popcorn and study every last page, we realize that not everyone can make the time to fully digest this comprehensive treatise. To that end, we have taken the time to write an executive summary of the DBIR for readers of our blog – because we care, and we don’t want you missing reruns or tee time.
This year’s DBIR is broken up into 8 major sections: Introduction, Results and Analysis, Incident Classification Patterns, Industries, SMB, Regions, Wrap-up, and Appendices. Let’s dig in by getting a sense of the sheer amount of work that the DBIR team puts in here:
We are extremely proud of the men and women in our organization who have served our country. Coming from the Navy, Air Force, Marines, and Army, these members have taken their experiences in the military and applied it to their civilian careers. To honor the veterans on our staff, I asked them to share - what they learned, their greatest achievement, their greatest challenge, and how we can step up to support our veterans. Thank you, Mike, Nathalie, Jason, Derek, Joel, and Jason!
I remember the first time my dad gave me a box of tools. I was moving out for the first time, and he gave me a box filled with an old hammer, two screwdrivers (one flathead, the other Phillips head), a rusty wrench, and a tape measure. It wasn’t much but it showed me that he wanted to make sure that I was ok. He gave me those tools so that I could fix any problems that came up in my time away from him. Well, I want to do the same for you but with cybersecurity. Now I’m not your father, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t want you to be safe online, and there are tons of tools online that can help you strengthen your cybersecurity.
October is Cybersecurity Awareness Month, but it is also well known, among the vernacular of the younger generation, as Spooky Season. Most people are more concerned with ghosts, ghouls, and goblins than they are with the dangers lurking in the dark corners of the Internet, which is understandable. It’s more fun to think about the fake monsters than the real ones who could change your life in an instant. So, let’s make a compromise. We’re going to list the 7 scariest ghosts and monsters when it comes to cybersecurity, and we’ll try to make it as spooky as possible.
The Netflix docudrama film The Social Dilemma describes Facebook as “The problem beneath all other problems.” As this is a security/technical blog we are not in the business of bashing or praising social media, but it goes without saying that Facebook has become omnipresent in the daily lives of literally billions of people. The same is also true of Instagram and WhatsApp, two other massive social media properties which were also unavailable for about six hours on October 4th. When something that big falls that hard, there are always unforeseen and unintended consequences.
If you’ve watched any sci-fi movie, you probably understand the perceived dangers of the digital world. Primarily the unrealistic dangers of artificial intelligence. Now, I’m not saying that AI won’t be a threat in the future but it’s important to note that right now the people using the Internet pose a much bigger threat than an incoming Robo-Apocalypse. And I’m not just talking about cybercriminals. Regular, everyday human error is what poses the most dangerous threat to your company’s cybersecurity. Don’t believe me? Well then, let’s take a quick look.
Today, we toast our company as we mark 17 years in business. Last year, we boasted that we didn’t just survive 2020 but we thrived – and 2021 has raised the bar higher as we celebrated a number of achievements:
Have you ever wondered where all those weird holidays come from? Like, who got to decide that April 23rd was National Talk Like Shakespeare Day? Or that Squirrel Appreciation Day would fall on January 21st? Or that the last Friday of every April would be National Hairball Awareness Day? An entire day to make sure that your feline friends aren’t spewing wet clumps of hair on to the floor seems like a waste of time, but do you know what isn’t? An entire month dedicated to cybersecurity. Now that’s a topic worthy of a holiday!