We talk about how a companies data backup is critical but what about if you are a content publisher on the internet? University of Ottawa’s online student news site was attacked and years of content was deleted over a weekend. Luckily a data backup was found that was a week old, so the site could be restored. The incident is a reminder to make sure More »
Hackers managed to steal biometric data collected by U.S. Customs and Border Patrol. The Washington Post reported that images of people’s faces and license plates were lost in the attack, which can be used to construct identity theft. Loss of biometric information is especially dangerous due to their permanence; once lost, they present a persistent threat. The CBP reported that fewer than 100,000 people were More »
IT security experts say they still come across business leaders in Canada who don’t believe their organization will be targeted for a cyber attack. A new report from security vendor Proofpoint should help dispel that. Looking at data from customer devices, the company found that between January 1 and May 1, threat actors conducted thousands of malicious email campaigns, hundreds of which were sent to More »
Facial recognition has been around for a short time. Apple users can use it to unlock their iPhone. Many airports use facial recognition. I have seen facial recording at the self checkout areas at many retail stores. Facial recognition isn’t a futuristic dream, it’s already here in a big way. New doorbells on the market can recognize familiar faces to tell you who’s come calling and More »
McAfee has released its latest report “Grand Theft 2”. Here is a link to the full report here https://www.mcafee.com/enterprise/en-us/assets/reports/restricted/rp-data-exfiltration-2.pdf The results were from a survey of 700 IT and security pros who worked at organizations in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, India, Singapore, the United Kingdom, and the United States. As the graph indicates, compared to 2015, intentional breaches by employees have dropped from 30 percent More »
Are your beloved voice assistants listening to your conversation? According to Bloomberg, the answer is yes, and by thousands of people. In its hotly trending article, Bloomberg interviewed seven works dedicated to transcribing keywords in conversations recorded from Amazon Alexa. They’re supposed to help Alexa more accurately respond to these keywords, but as you’d imagine, these conversations can often be extremely personal private. Audio details include More »
Small and mid-sized companies face a dilemma when it comes to cyber security: If they can’t afford full-time infosec experts to effectively defend themselves, what and how much can they afford to do? To answer, the government hopes, is in a new guide issued by the Canadian Centre for Cyber Security. The Centre is the recently-established federal advisory agency on security. It’s a unit of More »
Canada faced the second biggest increase in malware attacks last year among customers according to corporate security vendor SonicWall. Malware attacks detected by those using SonicWall firewalls and other security devices hit 432.2 million, up 103 per cent over 2017, according to a report released Tuesday by the company in its annual cyber threat report. By comparison, attacks against Brazil were up 119 per cent More »
I received this question via email yesterday. “How do small to medium size businesses protect themselves from hackers in today’s connected digital world?” Here are some basic steps all businesses should take that do not take a lot of money to begin. 1) Educate your employees – most attacks on small business come via bad emails. Get your IT professional to explain how attacks occur More »
Windows 7 is now in extended support and Microsoft’s end-of-service date for Windows 7 is January 14, 2020 Now, we here at HSL consider any OS in ‘extended support’ to be End Of Life as the manufacturer may or may not publish a fix for any bugs found. There is no obligation or guaranty that a patch will be released if an issue is found. More »