Even During a Pandemic, Technology Never Sleeps

As we see ourselves rolling comfortably through what is often referred to as the “Dog Days of Summer”, we are able take a quick moment and reflect before the fall and winter inevitably arrive.

The year 2020 has been incredibly rough for all of humanity all across the planet Earth. Uncertainties within the health care industry, finances and throughout the workforce, most people have just not been able to catch a break.

At home, the Covid-19 pandemic continues to batter the United States from coast-to-coast. Advances in technology are allowing companies to ramp up their research and testing, which is assisting in creating vaccines. Unfortunately though, while the United States attempts to wrangle in Covid-19, the rest of the technology world does not rest.

Hackers are still on their game, even more so now that a large amount of the United States workforce finds themselves working from home.

With the aforementioned large amount of workforce working from home, vulnerability is at an all-time high, which is only further highlighted by two news stories that recently dropped.

• The University of Utah announced that they have paid $457,059 to a ransomware group to avoid pertinent student information being leaked.
• While the University of Utah had some form of a cyber insurance policy to help pay the ransom, they lost roughly 0.02% of their overall data. There will be a strong attempt to somehow spin this PR nightmare into a positive but at the end of the day, this is an incredible breach of trust between the University of Utah and their student body. 

Another story that broke this week involved an unsecured database and a massive data leak.

• Researchers over at Comparitech uncovered the aforementioned unsecured database, which left almost 235 million Instagram, TikTok and Youtube user profiles exposed.
• Based on collected samples, it was reported that “one in five records contained either a telephone number or email address.”

In both these scenarios, ensuring you have implemented Two-Factor Authentication policies as well as some sort of best practice for changing passwords / creating difficult-to-crack passwords could have helped make a huge difference.

We at Info Advantage recently announced a new product – iaGuardianSECURE Dark Web. This product is a perfect way to ensure your company is protected from the dark web and any potential threats that come along with that. “With cyber threats increasing every day, iaGuardianSECURE Dark Web brings peace of mind knowing you are proactively protecting your company’s brand, employees, executives, and customers.” 

Are you interested in making sure your company is protected from the Dark Web?
Give us a call today at 585-254-8710 to get started or CLICK HERE to learn more.