If your company has an incident response plan that you can rely on in the face of a cyber attack, then you’re ahead of most of the world, according to research recently conducted by the Ponemon Institute. Shockingly, more than 75 percent of survey respondents from around the world admitted that they have no formal incident response plan. Even worse, half of the companies that indicated they had an incident response plan said that it was informal.
Curiously, given these statistics, 72 percent of organizations indicated that they were more resilient today than they were the year before. They also indicated a high level of confidence in their staff to respond appropriately to any problem that arose.
Given the stark reality and the ever-increasing number of attacks, that comes off more like bravado than genuine confidence. Ted Julian, the Vice President of product management of IBM Resilient (sponsor of the Ponemon Institute’s research) had this to say:
“Having the right staff in place is critical, but arming them with the most modern tools to augment their work is equally important. A response plan that orchestrates human intelligence with machine intelligence is the only way security teams are going to get ahead of the threat and improve overall cyber-resilience.”
This year, most of the provisions of a new piece of legislation, GDPR (General Data Protection Regulations) come into effect, and companies that don’t have a formal incident response plan by then could pay a hefty price. Even if that weren’t the case, the research concluded that the overall cost of a data breach was nearly a million dollars lower on average when companies were able to deal with the breach decisively and contain it within thirty days.
The bottom line is, if you don’t have one yet, now is the time.
President & CEO
I hope you enjoyed this article. My mission is to take your stress away from dealing with IT problems. Call (252) 565-1235 or send me a message at our contact us page if you have a question, comment or want help.
There’s a fun, new update for Apple’s iMessage app that will probably make lots of power users happy. As long as you also have Google’s iOS app installed, you’ll be able to perform Google searches from within iMessage itself.
Freemium software is certainly nothing new. They are free apps that offer premium features if you don’t mind ads displaying while you’re using it or paying a small fee to have the ads removed. At least one company is trying a new business model on for size, albeit with limited success.
Marvell Semiconductor has a new product out, and it’s a game changer. Their new “Alaska” chip (the Alaska C 88×7120) is the first on the market to support the new 802.3 standard. The 802.3cd is on tap to eventually replace current Ethernet ports running at 25Gbps to 100Gbps with ports that will run at 50Gbps, 200 Gbps, and 400 Gbps.
If you post ads on Craigslist for short term employment, be aware that there’s a new malspam campaign that aims to distribute Sigma ransomware on the computers of unwary users.
According to a new report published by Spiceworks, nearly 90 percent of businesses will use some type of biometric technology for authentication by the year 2020. In fact, some 62 percent of companies already use biometrics in some form, with another 24 percent stating their intention to do so within the next two years.
A Reddit user named “Noam_ha” recently posted a screenshot displaying a popup message when users open the venerable Windows Media Player (WMP), asking users if they would instead like to open the video file with the company’s more modern Movies and TV app.
The “Spectre” vulnerability that impacts literally every Intel chip made over the last decade keeps finding new ways to make the news. In this instance, researchers at Ohio State University have discovered a new variant of the vulnerability that they have dubbed “SGX Spectre.” To understand how it’s different, a bit of explanation is in order.
If you have a Netflix account and children living at home, there’s a reason to cheer about the company’s most recent announcement. They’re rolling out some robust new parental control features that will allow you to exert much more control over what your children are watching.
