Late February 2017, a new type of ransomware for Mac was discovered. This ransomware, called FindZip, infects users by pretending to be a cracked version of commercial applications, such as Adobe Premiere Pro. Once it infects a Mac, it utilizes a ZIP e…
While overall IT budgets are experiencing minimal growth – a compound annual growth rate of 0.9 percent in 2016 (to $3.4 trillion) – the sky is the limit when it comes to cloud: Cloud infrastructure spending will increase 16.2 percent in 2016 to $37.4 billion, with a 5-year CAGR of 13.6 percent to $60.8 billion in 2020. That’ss just the hardware; public cloud services are expected to reach $208 billion in 2016, up from $178 billion in 2015. Gartner attributes the growth to the fact that organizations are saving 14 percent of their budgets as an outcome of public cloud adoption.
Ever answered your mobile phone only to find silence? Or that a machine has called you? Or even that it’s a completely unexpected call from someone claiming to be from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS)?
Avast is a fantastic employer, we have offices around the world, and a cool company culture . More than 20% of Avast employees are women, which means there are 435 of us! For International Women’s Day on March 8th, we asked our female colleagues a few questions to find out why they like working for Avast.
After years of using hotspots, many of us who connect our PCs via Wi-Fi away from home have learned the difference between secured and unsecured networks – and are now smarter and safer when we get online at the café or airport. But our connection habits are changing. In 2016, average smartphone usage grew 38 percent, and more mobile phone traffic – nearly 60 percent – was handled by Wi-Fi hotspots than by cellular networks, putting our phones at risk, too. Add the proliferation of Internet of Things (IoT) devices, and today’s Wi-Fi threats can outpace even the tech-savviest among us. Because we have greater mobility and connectivity, hackers are motivated to take advantage of our need for both.
People often trust their social media contacts more than traditional advertising, and more readily believe everything from restaurant reviews to political opinions when it comes from a social network. An amusing or tragic anecdote that may not be representative of any trend has a better chance of going viral than a well-reported story with lots of analysis and facts. As always, there are marketers, abusers, propagandists, and outright criminals who are quick to exploit these psychological biases. The person who attacks you over a political tweet may be a paid troll or a robot. The spam you ignored in your inbox is now served into a trusted social media feed. The phishing attacks and malicious links you’d never click on in an anonymous email may now appear as a recommendation from a good friend, or a celebrity you admire. These attacks may even be customized by AI to target you perfectly, the way you get shopping or movie recommendations.
Mobile threats are on a rise, becoming more sophisticated and difficult to detect. We expect that in 2018 it will reach the same magnitude as PC malware.
History teaches us that everything changes, and that’s particularly true when it comes to cybersecurity where a vulnerability, accidental or malicious, can put a business at risk any time, any where. While cybersecurity must address the core functions — Identify, Protect, Detect, Respond and Recover — in a holistic manner, what are the processes, practices, hardware and software that when combined and integrated together can provide effective cybersecurity? The following is not a definitive list, but it does cover the basics required to better secure your information assets.
One of the realities of today’s cybersecurity threatscape is not if you will be breached, but when, and how often. As good as cybersecurity is becoming – i.e. prevention solutions provide a 99.9 percent or higher detection rate for common malware – effective cybersecurity depends upon three pillars – prevention, detection and resolution – with the latter two required to address those situations where prevention isn’t enough.