Names like Locky and CryptoLocker are familiar due to numerous news reports, but if you haven’t heard of the growing threat of ransomware, here’s a quick summary: Ransomware is a type of malware that locks you out of your devices by encrypting your files. In return for access with the decryption key, it demands a payment, typically in bitcoin. In many cases, victims of ransomware cannot recover their files, so a backup is essential.
I fell for it the first time I answered a call. A friendly female voice hesitated, then giggled the line, “Can you hear me?” After I answered, “Yes”, it took me a few seconds to realize I had been fooled. It wasn’t a silly girl with a bad connection calling me on behalf of Disney Vacations – I had just been targeted by a robocaller. By then it was too late.
Most of us have countless online accounts; and without even realizing it, we spread our personal information throughout the World Wide Web. We therefore wanted to find out how people not only value the information they store in their online accounts, b…
Today’s cybersecurity is good, with most prevention solutions having a 99.9% or higher detection rate for common malware, but once penetrated, identification is usually a case of too little, too late. The mean time to identify (MTTI) a data breach was 201 days, and a mean time to contain (MTTC) was 70 days. In up to 70% of cases, data breaches were detected by third parties.
Fraud attacks on banks are becoming more common and attackers use sophisticated methods to steal big amounts of money. We have witnessed several large attacks on ATMs globally over the past few months; in Thailand, India, Latin America, across Europe, …
What do millions of desktop and laptop users have in common? I’ll give you a hint: You are busy with some activity on your laptop and a message pops up informing you that one of your software programs or tools needs updating. If you are like most people, you hit the ‘Remind Me Later’ option, and keep doing what you’re doing. Later often never comes. Does that sound familiar?
Have you ever been tempted by one of those ads promising “You can earn $20,000 a month by working from home just 4 hours a day!”? Most of us probably have, even for a moment.
The topic of fake news is at the forefront of our political debate, now more than ever. What gave rise to its ubiquity? How do we combat it? Is this just an inevitable outcome of the Internet opening up a wider space for communication?
When we moved the Prague headquarters of Avast to the beautiful new Enterprise Office Center in January 2016, we strived to create a Silicon Valley-style working environment. Popular design ideas, conceived to foster collaboration among individuals and teams, were built into the 15,000 square meter office space. At the opening of the new building, Avast CEO, Vince Steckler said, “Avast has chosen a building that reflects its open, innovative, and inspirational company culture.”
We were surprised by a recent research report that found enterprises are moving more quickly to managed security service providers (57 percent to provide 24×7 IT systems monitoring, 45 percent for threat detection and intelligence, and 41 percent …