Articles

By Terry Cutler Cybersecurity and regulatory compliance are crucial diverse areas for businesses, healthcare professionals, financial service providers, and political leaders, involving meeting various regulatory controls to protect data confidentiality and network integrity.  Take a deep breath. It’s not as bad as it sounds. Many of these controls come from different sources: CIS Controls (Center…

Rushing through process implementations, technology upgrades, and new hire training can cause botched executions and unnecessary confusion. Businesses must pursue the top technologies for scalability. This sustainable strategy allows them to grow smarter, not just faster. Sustainability in business is about being repeatable, adaptable and capable of scaling up and down as needed. Sustainable scaling…

There are telltale signs your company email is being hacked. A rejected password The first sign your email is being hacked is you can’t sign in. If you notice your password is being repeatedly rejected, more than likely a hacker has changed it to block you out.  Second, if you got into your email, it’s…

Search and track your company information on the dark side Dark Web monitoring can help you find leaked or stolen company information on the Dark Web. For example, monitoring could lead to discovering old and new passwords, stolen log-ins, customer information, and credit card numbers.   Ideally, it is a place to hide and lease ransomware…

“How can I prevent someone from hacking my company?” I am asked this question whenever I speak to business CEOs. My response? Ensure your workers never open their emails. Of course, that’s not possible. The answer is to train them to be your frontline prevention against cybercriminal’s phishing attacks. First, this would be the right…

Overly disgruntled employees turning to malicious hackers From the experienced human resources leader to the new employee, security awareness training will foster a defence culture that would protect the company against the unprecedented rising ransomware attacks and, now, the malicious employee! As I reported in January 2022 in Small to medium-sized business owners vulnerable to…

Hackers are increasingly targeting agriculture to manipulate data and shut down processing plants By Terry Cutler Technology in agriculture was a few milking machines and farmers hand-fed their animals. Wholesome is a word that comes to mind—Milk and eggs on the table, a family at work on the farm, are just some of the images…

Three billion phishing emails a day are sent to unsuspecting employees. One in every 99 emails are phishing attacks—those cleverly crafted fake emails targeting data designed to look like they come from trusted senders. Left alone, these emails mean nothing, but one click on a “sexy looking” link means everything to a hacker—they are in…

With ransomware the top threat for businesses, I predict 2022 will be the year of astronomical numbers of ransomware attacks. They won’t be solely in sectors once the favourite of hackers—electrical grids, gas and oil systems, and life-saving hospital equipment—but in supply chains and low-level operators with connections to higher up the chain.  In one…

Deepfakes are designed images, audio, and video content using Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) technologies to look like accurate content and spread misinformation and lead to ransomware. The scrupulous replaces the voice/image of a particular person’s speech to manipulate information. For instance, One goal of Deepfake is to confuse and spread disinformation campaigns…

Canadian victims have recorded 235 known ransomware attacks in 2021. According to a Canada digital cybersecurity agency report, more than half hit electrical grids, oil and gas systems. Most ransomware attacks go unreported, warns the Communication Security Establishment’s (CSE) Canadian Centre for Cyber Security published in December 2021.  Hackers use malware to infect individuals or…

What if your company has trained your employees in cybersecurity? Is the network safe now? Your employees may be trained, and you are updating them as fresh forms of hacking are discovered. What if the latest attack was a deliberate attack from someone working in an office or a cubicle—an employee you trained? An employee…

If you lie awake at night obsessing over your cyber security systems, you may have another obsession: Cyber insurance (CI). Will your policy cover a cyber attack? Will your policy cover different attacks? Or will it cover specific attacks and not others?  However, CI coverage protects businesses from lawsuits after an attack on their systems.…

Data breaches exposed 16 billion records, including credit cards, home addresses, phone numbers and other personal information in June 2020. That’s a 273% increase compared to Q1 2019, making the first quarter of 2020 the worst period in data breach history, with a reported 8 billion records exposed. Inga Goddijn, Executive Vice President, Risk-Based Security,…

In cyber security language, a loss of a company’s brand and reputation is known as reputational risk. This risk we describe as a potential threat or a danger to the good name. Moreover, the confidence of its loyal customers and the historical standing of a company falls. Reputational risk is one of the five cyberattacks,…

In today’s business world, employees are often the first contact for customers with questions about billing, updates and new purchases—they are also the ones holding the keys to the front door for hackers.  Above all, Through a phishing scheme, eliciting from an unsuspecting employee a quick click on a link, and the door to your…

Don’t wait until it’s too late Ransomware attacks on small to large businesses, threatens the integrity of their networks, the privacy of workers’ personal information, and protecting customer data, such as credit card, banking, and personal information.  The general definition of ransomware is malware that employs encryption to hold a victim’s information at ransom. A…

With today’s sophisticated cybersecurity protection strategies, it may seem a hack is less likely than ten to 20 years ago. As companies upgrade their systems to advanced levels of protection, so do the hackers. It takes a higher level of hacking skill to break into today’s systems, but today’s hackers have the skills. With today’s…

Because you didn’t get an audit beforehand and want to save your business from getting hacked By Terry Cutler You might not know this, but hackers have been lurking in your system for months, even years. When you finally discover their presence, it may already be too late.  Or if you are one of the…