Directive Blogs

Passwords have been a primary data security measure since 1960, when MIT researcher Fernando Corbató suggested the practice—although even he is reportedly slow to take full credit. Why? Well, if you ask Corbató (and his contemporaries, who were the first to implement passwords as we’d recognize them today), the security concerns were limited.

So, have we reached the point where it would be best to replace passwords as the default authentication measure?

With cybersecurity a priority for every business that depends on their IT, there are a lot of different strategies being utilized out there to keep threats off of networks and data safe. One of the most advanced strategies being used today is enlisting a service that runs a Security Operations Center (SOC). Today, we’ll investigate what a SOC is and how it works to keep threats at bay. 

The cloud is far and away one of the most beneficial technologies that a modern business has at its disposal. Unfortunately, the same can be said for modern cybercriminals. The cloud has given cybercriminals new opportunities that are important to acknowledge—as well, of course, to protect your business against.

Ransomware is widely regarded as one of the worst modern cyberthreats out there today, and there's plenty of evidence to support this. These attacks and their aftereffects can devastate businesses of all industries. Let's consider why it is that ransomware is so dangerous, and what can be done to fight it. 

How often do you find yourself stressing out about who has access to which data or internal resources on your company network? What about who has access to open the front door of your office or who has access to important physical resources within your building? Ensuring the security of your business’ assets is critical, and access control tools can help your company ensure that only authorized individuals have access to specific parts of your organization’s infrastructure, be it physical or digital.

Whether you’re referring to ransomware, phishing, data theft, spoofing, any of the many forms of cybercrime, it is something that all businesses need to prepare themselves for. While different business sizes will have differing scales to contend with, these kinds of preparations will involve the same basic principles. To help you best defend your company against cybercrime, here are a few tips based on those principles.

Gauging the effectiveness of your cybersecurity can be a bit of a daunting task, especially when asking if it could make a major difference in protecting your organization’s network infrastructure. If you want to track and measure your business’ cybersecurity preparedness, here are four steps to help you perform an evaluation.

Getting your staff to care about your organizational network and data security may be more difficult than you might think, but it’s not a lost cause. Today, keeping your business’ organizational security strong relies heavily on your staff’s willingness to follow the right practices, so today we thought we’d give you seven tips to get your people to care about security

In the business world, it can be difficult to know who to trust in regard to cybersecurity. In many cases, businesses are simply opting to not trust any device, friend or foe, when it comes to their data security. This type of zero-trust model is slowly becoming the norm, and it’s one that your organization might consider moving forward.

Cyberattacks can cost businesses a lot of money. They’re also more prevalent today than ever before. It seems you can’t go a couple of news cycles without hearing about some organization that has been hacked or scammed and it’s resulted in the sensitive data the organization holds being sold online, vast operational downtime, or worse. For this reason, many organizations have deliberately built up their cybersecurity infrastructure, enhanced their policies, and invested in training to ensure that they aren’t the next victim. Unfortunately, this attention doesn’t always work. 

Hopefully, you’re aware of how important cybersecurity is today—if not, make sure you come back to our blog often for more information on that. The Internet, for all its benefits, can easily be the source of serious threats. With today’s youth growing more connected, these threats can easily target them… making it all the more important to start teaching cybersecurity awareness and best practices early. 

Ransomware has been commonplace for years, with no sign of it going anywhere anytime soon. Let’s take a few moments to examine the state of ransomware right now, and review how to keep it from impacting your businesses.

More workplaces than ever before are utilizing the power of remote technology, but this also creates problems with security that must be addressed. How can you ensure that your organization isn’t putting itself at risk as a result of this general displacement of your workforce? Let’s discuss some action items you might choose to implement for your business.

Penetration testing is a topic that you might often hear and read about on the Internet, but you might not know exactly what it is without having it explained to you by a professional. Today, we want to clear up any misconceptions or ideas you might have about penetration testing and how it relates to your business’ network security, compliance, and regulatory requirements.

Cybersecurity is an important subject for a business’ entire team to appreciate, particularly when it comes to the minute differences between different terms. For instance, a layperson might hear “breach” and automatically think “security incident.” While this technically isn’t incorrect, per se, the two terms aren’t really synonymous.

Let’s take a few moments to dive into the minutiae and define these two terms more clearly.

Workforces have been increasingly distributed and many businesses aim to continue that strategy for the foreseeable future. There are a fair share of challenges that distributed employees have themselves, but for the business, it can be tough getting them to do the things that need to be done to secure the business. Here are a few actions that need to be taken if you want to make that happen. 

Look, we are big fans of the cloud, especially for data storage, but you shouldn’t implement the cloud without a solid security strategy. Whether you are using it for your business’ data storage needs or just to take backups of your infrastructure, you’ll still need to keep various facets of security in mind for your cloud storage. It all starts with figuring out how secure your cloud provider really is.

As statistics for cybercrime surge, it’s important to remember that your organization must do all that it can to protect itself. There is, however, a C-suite position that almost exclusively focuses on this task: the chief information security officer, or CISO. Many enterprises have individuals dedicated to the sole task of securing their organization, but smaller businesses might find themselves lagging behind in this regard due to no fault of their own.

Smart devices are everywhere, with the Internet of Things (the blanket term for any device that connects to the Internet for added functionality) growing larger each day. While this is great for convenience (and in many cases, the "cool factor") it can have some chilling ramifications for cybersecurity.

With so many employees still working remotely, organizations have turned to technology to ensure that their workers are actually… you know, working. While the need to know what your employees are up to throughout the workday is important, there is now a discussion happening on whether or not this violates employees’ privacy.