Sage Advice - Cybersecurity Blog

Tyler’s recent 12th Annual CyberCrime Symposium did not disappoint. The long-awaited in-person conference, held in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, brought together over 100 industry peers from across New England and the United States. As a result of the chaos and rise in cyberthreats caused by the pandemic, this year’s conference centered around the future of resilience.

Phishing, in its most basic form, is when an attacker sends emails that appear to be coming from a trusted source to trick the victim into giving up information, clicking on a dangerous link, or downloading malicious files. Phishing is a broad term and can take shape in many ways. Email is the primary vehicle for phishing attacks, but it can also include voice phishing, SMS phishing, or instant messaging phishing.

What is Multi-Factor Authentication?

One of the most common risks when remotely accessing a network or cloud services are user account breaches. When remote access logins only require a username and password, the traditional method of preventing account compromises is to add multi-factor authentication (MFA). MFA requires:

A Brief Foray into the Executive Order on Improving the Nation’s Cybersecurity[1]
by Gary Soucy, Tyler Cybersecurity, Senior Cybersecurity Advisor

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a common term used by digital marketers, and is a technique used by many organizations to generate clicks on digital content, drive website traffic, and more. While SEO efforts and techniques vary – and can be paid or unpaid – the goal for marketers remains the same: to expand visibility by targeting online users through search engines.

A Business Email Compromise (BEC), also referred to as an Email Account Compromise, is one of the most financially devastating cyberattacks. The Anti-Phishing Working Group found that in 2020 BEC scams cost an average of $80,000 per successful attack. And according to the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center BEC attacks accounted for $1.8 billion in losses that same year.

Malicious behavior using new malware variants is on the rise. Cybercriminals continue to expand and improve attack methods, uncover new vulnerabilities, and develop fresh exploits. Unfortunately, these evolving techniques work because they often get through traditional defenses undetected. With proper knowledge, awareness, and cautious browsing, you can help defend against these attacks and keep both you and your organization’s data secure.

Cyberattacks against organizations are still on the rise, and unfortunately, they are only getting harder to detect. Hackers know how to break through traditional defenses to get what they want. But it’s not just web-based attacks that you need to be aware of, physical skimming attacks that could affect you financially should also be on your radar.

On March 10, 2021, OVH, a large data hosting center in France that is responsible for thousands of customers and millions of websites’ data, experienced a devastating fire. OVH has four data centers – in four separate buildings as part of the same complex – and one was destroyed. Another building was severely damaged. The other two were far enough away from the fire to remain safe, but the data center was left with half of their previous operating capacity.

What does this unfortunate situation have to do with your cybersecurity efforts? Since many organizations rely on these types of data centers for their cloud storage, network housing, and backups, there is much we can learn from the incident. We’ll look at the lessons learned below.