I have been fascinated by data analytics for all my professional life — from my early days of using Linux command-line tools like grep, cut, sort and unique to make sense of log files and identify the chain of events that harmed my web server, to using simple Excel and pivot tables to do pretty much the same with data of all types. Now, we have much fancier

Each year on January 28, the United States, Canada, Israel and 47 European countries observe Data Privacy Day. The purpose of Data Privacy Day is to inspire dialogue on the importance of online privacy. These discussions also seek to inspire individuals and businesses to take action in an effort to respect privacy, safeguard data and enable trust.In observan

When you’re a journalist or work for the press, there may be times when you need to take extra cybersecurity precautions—more so than your Average Joe. Whether a reporter is trying to crowd-source information without revealing their story or operating in a country where freedom of the press is a pipe dream, cybersecurity plays an important role for any journ

When organization leaders think about cybersecurity, it’s usually about which tools and practices they need to add to their stack—email protection, firewalls, network and endpoint security, employee awareness training, AI and machine-learning technology—you get the idea. What’s not often considered is which items should be taken away. Nearly

Penetration testing is often conducted by security researchers to help organizations identify holes in their security and fix them, before cybercriminals have the chance. While there’s no malicious intent for the researcher, part of his job is to think and act like a cybercriminal would when hacking, or attempting to breach, an enterprise network. T

It’s Monday. On the West Coast, Black Hat is over and if you traveled, you should be home. If you didn’t travel, it’s still Monday and there are things to be done. And August starts tomorrow – so you might be thinking, “Bah, let’s get through August and then I’ll refocus.” Not so fast. This is a round tuit. Y

 The US Congress  decided to repeal an Internet privacy regulation passed under the Obama administration. For many, this is unsettling news. Trump has already initialed the controversial repeal, which allows Internet providers to store and sell users’ browsing histories. The previous regulation, however, required these companies to obtain permission fr

Sometimes you could be forgiven for thinking that the incessant overuse of the word ‘disruptive’ these days could do with some, well, disrupting of its own. So much is written, presented and marketed around apparently ‘disruptive’ use of technologies like AI, IoT and of course blockchain, when much of it could perhaps be better described as foundation innova

Data privacy is a concern for many Americans, but the U.S. Senate is on its way to putting your data at even higher risk of privacy issues. Current laws have broadband privacy rules in place that require Internet Service Providers to receive explicit consent from consumers before they can share or sell private information, such as web browsing data, to adver

A specialty practice in Texas has notified more than 200,000 patients of a ransomware attack that might have exposed their personal information.On 24 March, Urology Austin sent out notification letters to 279,663 patients informing them of an incident that occurred back in January. As quoted by DataBreaches.net:“On January 22, 2017, Urology Austin was

On March 1, Marissa Mayer, Yahoo!’s Chief Executive Office, gave up millions of dollars. As she noted in a blog post on Tumblr, “I am the CEO of the company [Yahoo!] and since this incident happened during my tenure, I have agreed to forgo my annual bonus and my annual equity grant.” All in, Mayer gave up upwards of 2 million in cash bonuses and millions mor

Many IT decision makers look at assets as hardware, but really they should consider why they have the hardware in the first place.These decision makers remember the very significant investments they made in servers, PCs, firewalls, and so on in order to deploy that new CRM or Electronic Medical Records System. They think of the tens of thousands of dollars t

The Pennsylvania State Democratic Caucus has taken its computer systems temporarily offline following a ransomware attack.According to PennLive, the caucus discovered the attack early in the morning on 3 March. Offices remained open throughout the day. Even so, members and employees alike couldn’t access systems or data because the ransomware had sprea

If the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation), the EU’s data protection harmonisation project, was to become Hollywood movie, its genre would most likely be horror.Focus on the regulation over the past twelve months has been mostly aimed toward its penalties, with scare stories in no short supply. The GDPR has been called many things; visionary, giv

InterContinental Hotels Group (IHG) has confirmed a data breach affected customers’ payment cards at 12 of its locations.On 3 February, IHG announced that it launched an investigation back on 28 December 2016 after receiving a report of unauthorized charges placed on customers’ credit cards. The Denham-based company, which owns 5,000 hotels that