Sage Advice - Cybersecurity Blog

At his 2019 CyberCrime Symposium presentation, Jim Reavis saluted the audience for participating in the annual event, noting the high ratio of return attendees.

For its 10th anniversary, the CyberCrime Symposium took to the cloud, where security still concerns, confuses and confounds info-sec pros. For this year’s event, sponsored by AWS, Tyler Cybersecurity put together a stellar lineup of speakers, who took the stage to discuss the high stakes of cybersecurity in a world taken with the cloud.    

Ransomware attacks can have devastating consequences for organizations. Downtime is often more detrimental than ransom costs. Recovery is expensive, and there is a significant cost in system disruption, emergency response, and reputation damage.

Ransomware continues to be a significant threat to organizations of all sizes. Victims of an attack are denied access to their data. Many times, files are encrypted, and a ransom is demanded to restore access. If hit, the best-case scenario is that you have clean backups to restore your systems and can avoid paying the ransom.  However, downtime is often more detrimental than ransom costs. Recovery is expensive, and there is a significant cost in system downtime, emergency response, and reputation damage.

Local governments and school districts are falling victim to ransomware attacks with alarming frequency and devastating consequences. At any organization, having tools in place to improve cyber resilience is a necessity, especially as hackers get more sophisticated every day.

The epic Target breach raised our awareness that third-party service providers are a significant cybersecurity risk. It showed us how an employee at an HVAC vendor could click a phishing link and result in 40 million credit / debit card numbers and 70 million customer and employee records being compromised.

Like everything in technology today, the activities of cybercriminals are constantly evolving. Your organization must keep pace to protect your data and your reputation. The place most clients are with this query is, “What are our peers doing?”

Cloud computing has gained popularity over the past few years, and organizations large and small are utilizing a variety of cloud services to support their business needs.

The popular tax preparation software TurboTax recently announced that an unauthorized party had accessed an undisclosed number of its clients’ accounts. But it wasn’t because they had suffered a data breach. Instead they were victims of a credential stuffing attack – a cyberattack that continues to gain popularity. 

With cyber-attacks increasing, the likelihood that many organizations are experiencing the same attack is also increasing.  When such an incident occurs, the intelligence gathered – including what happened, how it was dealt with, and lessons that were learned – can teach your organization what to do in the same situation.  In today’s dynamic threat environment, it’s impossible to single-handedly keep on top of everything.  Implementing a threat intelligence program can help you better protect your organization.