IoT adoption has been predicted to increase 50 percent in 2016, although it widely varies by industry. While some industries, such as utilities, oil and gas, and manufacturing, are highly responsive in terms of adoption, others don’t even have a plan to implement IoT, Gartner estimates.
In the recent post, Healthcare Security Lapses: No Signs of Slowdown, we discussed just how big the challenges are to securing healthcare data. To get a sense of what healthcare providers may be doing that are hampering their efforts, we turned to a long-time hospital chief information security officer, Eric W. Cowperthwaite. Cowperthwaite served at Seattle–based Providence Health & Services as its first Chief Information Security Officer for more than seven years. Cowperthwaite also served as the first Information Security Officer of Medi-Cal (California’s Medicaid program), where he established a formal information security program.
The most serious financial consequence to companies that suffer a data breach is lost business: both direct costs – i.e. engaging forensic experts, hiring a law firm, offering victims’ identity protection services -, and indirect costs – such as the time, effort and organizational resources spent during the data breach resolution, loss of goodwill and customer churn. The total cost of a data breach has risen by almost a third since 2013, meaning that a serious breach may eventually ruin a business.
Total losses caused by Business Email Compromise (BEC), a sophisticated scam targeting businesses working with foreign suppliers and businesses that regularly pay by wire transfer, have grown 13-fold since January in identified exposed losses, reaching over $3 billion, FBI says.
Since nothing that’s being executed in raw memory is encrypted – just scrambled – APTs that try to execute malicious code on a machine will be intercepted by HVI long before they actually compromise the operating system. In fact, as soon as the malicious code, even delivered via zero-day exploit, tries to execute in the VMs memory, the introspection engine will immediately “see” the malicious action and the code that was trying to be executed.
Should the salaries of CEOs be linked to how well their company has protected itself against security threats?
British MPs certainly seem to think so.
As the threat landscape evolves, security vendors try to launch breakthrough technologies to help companies protect their data and their customers from sophisticated attacks that inflict significant losses of both money and reputation.
It seems there’s no shortage of enterprises that fall short when it comes to protecting their information and digital assets. Most of the time you will see this blamed on new attack techniques, advanced forms of custom malware, and the rise in recent years of state-sponsored snoops and criminals. Security professionals have it tough, as their adversaries are always improving their tactics, no doubt. And the technologies their organization uses to boost productivity and provide new services are always advancing in areas such as mobility, cloud, data analytics, and soon the Internet of Things.
Healthcare-related data breaches just are showing no signs of slowing down. Just last week, the Stamford Podiatry Group was reported by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office for Civil Rights to have suffered a hacking/IT incident that exposed the records of 40,491 people. Days later, the same office reported that Washington DC, VA Medical Center suffered a physical record theft that exposed 1,062 individuals.
Some of the most beneficial IoT implementations on the market relate to sensors and smart devices designed to reduce operational costs and improve productivity and processes. Perhaps some of the most obvious benefits of IoT solutions apply to industrial systems that have addoped sensors for getting live telemetry from critical systems. However, while IoT solutions can have obvious benefits and bring about significant progress, security concerns should not be dismissed.
It seems UK businesses are raising a white flag to online extortionists. One in three medium to large businesses is stocking up on Bitcoins to prepare to pay ransom in a ransomware attack, according to new research by Citrix.
Established companies like LinkedIn, Tumblr and MySpace are being run through the mill because of old security breaches that recently surfaced on the web. From a victim’s perspective, mitigation starts with a password reset, but what’s happening on the corporate side? How should companies react in full breach era to clean up the mess and regain clients’ credibility?
From 1960s mainframes to today’s cloud-centric evolution, data centers have undergone tremendous transformation. As applications became mission-critical, and desktop servers moved into formal data centers, the number of physical servers in a data center grew exponentially, making the job of managing this environment increasingly complex and expensive.
If no one trusted the Internet, what would that mean for online business—or even for business in general? Even as so many consumers and businesses rely on the web to conduct all kinds of transactions, fears about data breaches and loss of privacy has many people spooked about sharing personal information online.
