The holiday season has arrived, and cyberattacks are expected to increase with the upcoming celebratory events. According to The Retail & Hospitality Information Sharing and Analysis Center (RH-ISAC) 2022 Holiday Season Threat Trends and summary report, ransomware and phishing attacks are expected to increase in retail. With the FIFA World Cup 2022,...

Many people remember where they were during historic events. Whether it is a personal, or a public occurrence, it’s just human nature to remember these significant moments.  Every profession also has its share of memorable events.  In medicine, those who were in the profession will remember where they were when they heard about the first heart...

Have you ever walked up to an ATM after another person finished with the machine only to find they left it on a prompt screen asking, “Do you want to perform another transaction?” I have. Of course, I did the right thing and closed out their session before beginning my own transaction. That was a mistake an individual made by careless error which could...

The third quarter saw some major developments across the privacy space. In the U.S., we saw a federal bill for comprehensive privacy achieve more than ever before, children’s privacy proved to remain a top concern, and the Federal Trade Commission formally began its heavily criticized “Magnuson-Moss rulemaking” process. Not to be outdone, the...

  Compliance is an essential aspect of every organization, and in business terms, it entails ensuring that organizations of all sizes, and their personnel, comply with national and international regulations, such as GDPR, HIPAA, and SOX. When guaranteeing compliance, many firms frequently overlook security. Gary Hibberd states that compliance with...

If you were to take a look at the cybersecurity news cycle, you’d be forgiven for thinking that it’s only large enterprises with expansive customer bases and budgets that are the most vulnerable to attacks. But that’s not entirely true. Even if it’s at a much smaller scale, small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) still have stores of sensitive...

Law firms owe their clients several types of duties, such as the duty of care, duty to provide competent representation, as well as other ethical responsibilities. Their duties even extend to former clients and must be upheld long after they no longer have a formal attorney-client relationship. More specifically, lawyers have a duty to not disclose any...

The NIST Cybersecurity Framework was meant to be a dynamic document that is continuously revised, enhanced, and updated. These upgrades allow the Framework to keep up with technological and threat developments, incorporate lessons learned, and transform best practices into standard procedures. NIST created the Framework in 2014 and updated it with CSF 1...

As budgets start to tighten for countless businesses concerned about the potential financial winter that many are predicting, security teams across the world are reviewing where best to place their investment to ensure they get the best “bang for their buck”. With that in mind, now might be time to explore some key areas where I see organisations...

What is File Integrity Monitoring? The IT ecosystems of enterprises are highly dynamic. Typically, organizations react to this volatility by investing in asset discovery and Security Configuration Management (SCM). These core controls enable businesses to compile an inventory of authorized devices and monitor the configurations of those assets. In...

The increasing popularity of online payment systems results from the world’s gradual transition to a cashless and contactless digital economy — an economy, projected in a recent Huawei white paper, to be worth $23 trillion by 2025. With digital commerce emerging as the largest segment in the projected $8.49 trillion global digital payments market in...

In March 2022, the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) was updated with a number of new and modified requirements. Since their last update in 2018, there has been a rapid increase in the use of cloud technologies, contactless payments have become the norm, and the COVID-19 pandemic spurred a massive growth in e-commerce and online...

The new PCI DSS Standard, version 4.0, contains all the steps, best practices, and explanations required for full compliance.  In fact, even an organization that does not process cardholder data could follow the PCI Standard to implement a robust cybersecurity program for any of its important data. In our series about how the new standard differs from...

As we continue our review of the 12 Requirements of PCI DSS version 4.0, one has to stop and consider, is it possible to have a favorite section of a standard? After all, most guidance documents, as well as regulations are seen as tedious distractions from the importance of getting the job done. However, depending on a person’s position and function in...

In Part 1 of this series, we reviewed the first four sections of the new PCI standards. As we continue our examination of PCI DSS version 4.0, we will consider what organizations will need to do in order to successfully transition and satisfy this update. Requirements 5 through 9 are organized under two categories: Maintain a Vulnerability Management...

The Payment Card Industry Security Standards Council has released its first update to their Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) since 2018.  The new standard, version 4.0, is set to generally go into effect by 2024, but there are suggested updates that are not going to be required until a year after that.  This, of course, creates a couple of problems for...

It’s not often we can say this, but 2022 is shaping up to be an exciting time in information governance, especially for those interested in compliance and compliance frameworks. We started the year in eager anticipation of the new version of the international standard for information security management systems, ISO 27001:2022, soon to be followed by...

We all know that it is a question of when you will be compromised and not if you will be compromised. It is unavoidable. The goal of CIS Control 17 is to ensure that you are set up for success when that inevitable breach occurs. If an organization is neither equipped nor prepared for that potential data breach, they are not likely to succeeded in...

The Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) is a benchmark with tenure in the industry, with the first version being introduced in 2004. The PCI DSS was unique when it was introduced because of its prescriptive nature and its focus on protecting cardholder data. Cybersecurity is a changing landscape, and prescriptive standards must be...

In recent years, cyber espionage has been growing in magnitude and complexity. One of the most common targets is Industrial Control Systems (ICS) within critical infrastructure sectors. With many organizations relying more heavily on ICS networks, there has been an increase in threats and cyberattacks aimed at these systems. Not only do these attacks...