Recent research by Comparitech reveals the shocking truth about ransomware attacks on government entities; they have a longer impact than anyone thought. Tracking over 1100 government-targeted ransomware attacks over a period of six years, researchers discovered that each day of downtime cost entities nearly $83,600, and that in each attack the downtime lasted for an average of 27.8 days.Compared...

In July 2024, as the Republican National Committee (RNC) geared up for its national convention in Milwaukee, Chinese hackers infiltrated the RNC's email system. According to The Wall Street Journal, attackers maintained access for several months, trying to get their hands on intelligence on how the GOP planned to address Taiwan in its party platform. Microsoft alerted top party officials about...

On 16 July 2019, UK’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) released the second annual report of the Active Cyber Defence (ACD) program. The report seeks to show the effects that the program has on the security of the UK public sector and the wider UK cyber ecosystem.The Active Cyber Defence ProgramNCSC was set up in 2016 to be the single...

To distinguish the size of merchant companies and appropriately determine the level of testing required, the founding credit card companies created four different brackets ranging from Tier 1 to 4. Each tier is based on the number of transactions processed per year by the merchant and also dictates the testing a merchant must undertake. While...

The retail industry saw more than its fair share of data breaches in 2017, with security incidents impacting at American supermarket chain Whole Foods Market and clothing companies Brooks Brothers, The Buckle, and Forever 21, to name a few. At least some of those events likely resulted from retailers' poor data breach preparation. Consider the fact...

Despite retailers’ continuous improvement in compliance with the Payment Card Industry (PCI) security standards, four out of five companies are still failing at interim assessments, according to Verizon’s latest report. The report highlights that the overall state of compliance grew significantly in 2014, with 20 percent of organizations...