Modern wisdom states that if you’re not paying for a product, you’re the product.

For all the good the Internet is capable of doing, it is equally capable of being extremely harmful… especially when data is involved. Websites and social media platforms collect data from their users and track their movements across the Internet, sell it to advertisers, and more recently, use it to train AI.

Let’s go over what you can—and arguably should—do to limit these platforms' ability to do so.

It isn’t rare for people to subscribe to things and only stay subscribed because the cancellation process is so challenging and inconvenient. However, the Federal Trade Commission is looking to stop this, adopting a rule that eliminates the capability for businesses to put hurdles in front of cancellation processes.

Sextortion scams are scary. The scammer contacts the victim, claiming to have gotten access to their computer and captured video footage of their target partaking in some private and decidedly adult activities, as well as the content that was onscreen at the time. The threat: pay up, or I send the footage to all of your contacts.

Lately, however, hackers have added another layer of “proof” to these claims, now referring to victims by name and including pictures of their homes. Let’s walk through what one of these scams looks like and what you should do if one appears in your inbox.

The world’s biggest IT catastrophe forced airlines, hospitals, 911 call centers, and banks (among other businesses) to their knees last month. The costs from this massive outage are estimated to reach several billion dollars. We’re all going to be talking about it for several more months, and we’ll likely be seeing some high-level litigation. This blunder could potentially change the way we all think about IT and security, as well as create new laws.

The craziest thing (so far) about the entire CrowdStrike outage is how incredibly fast it crashed the entire world. I think this is the most important lesson for business owners to learn from.

In recent years, several workplace trends have emerged that many employers find challenging. One such trend is "quiet quitting," where employees do only the bare minimum required to keep their jobs. A more recent trend is to "act your wage."

It was very recently revealed that a global law enforcement effort took down a massive botnet that was in action for almost a decade. In light of this, we wanted to review what a botnet is and how it works, drawing from these events for some context.

The topic of net neutrality has had a tumultuous past few years, with steps forward canceled out by steps taken back. However, new efforts are being considered to restore the policies that made net neutrality what it was in the first place.

On Wednesday, April 10, 2024, Apple deemed it necessary to send a rare alert to certain users via email, spread out across 92 nations. As Apple’s website states, these threat notifications “are designed to inform and assist users who may have been individually targeted by mercenary spyware attacks.” Let’s review these attacks so we all understand this threat better.

Scams are a scary prospect, and with today’s technology and current events being what they are, it’s all the more important that you remain aware of them so you can avoid them. With a whole year ahead of us, let’s consider some scams and scam-based trends that will likely continue throughout.

Back in July, the White House secured commitments from Amazon, Anthropic, Google, Inflection, Meta, Microsoft, and OpenAI to help manage the risks that artificial intelligence potentially poses. More recently, eight more companies—Adobe, Cohere, IBM, Nvidia, Palantir, Salesforce, Scale AI, and Stability—also pledged to maintain “the development of safe, secure, and trustworthy AI,” as a White House brief reported.

A ransomware attack took out the computer network of Atlantic General Hospital, as was discovered on January 29th of this year. While the situation was resolved as of February 13th and the impacted departments returned to full operation, there are bound to be lasting ripples that will continue on for some time.

In recent months, publicly-accessible AI tools have ignited interest in using artificial intelligence amongst businesses, and for good reason. While these tools are very, very limited in what they can do—which we will discuss here for sure—they still show enormous potential.

However, this potential introduces a few major questions to the conversation. Let’s examine some of them.

When cyberattacks hit close to home; when an attack affects a large number of people, it really shows you just how much risk a business could be facing by not being prepared. Over Thanksgiving, a cybersecurity incident hit the Washington County government, and as of this writing, several services are still paused while things are getting restored.

It’s easy to focus on WHAT people should be doing to prevent themselves from becoming victims of cybercrime, but it’s just as easy to ignore the advice from experts while thinking “nah, that won’t really affect me.”

The thing is, you HAVE to be aware of these threats, and you have to take measures to protect yourself. We’re going to drop the dramatic language here, and focus on breaking the threats down so it’s easier to be more aware of them, and hopefully make it easier to navigate and circumvent a world that has a growing amount of cyber threats.

With 2023 sneaking up on us, you’ll need to consider the many challenges that businesses will face as we move into the new year. Many of these challenges can be remedied simply by implementing the right technology solutions, too!

You might have spotted some news saying that Microsoft Windows 8 and Server 2012 are soon to reach their End of Life date… in fact, you probably heard it from us. However, not everyone may really know what this means, and how it can impact their organizations. In light of this, we wanted to give some context as to what a software title or operating system’s “End of Life” is, and what needs to happen in preparation for it.

In May of 2021, Ireland’s Health Service Executive, which handles healthcare and social services to the Emerald Isle’s nearly five million residents, was the target of a massive ransomware attack. Even as businesses and municipalities from all over the globe have been dealing with this plight, we mention this because of the aftereffects of this situation. Today, we take a look at the situation and what can be learned from it.