Nist 2020 guidelines recommend that you have at least eight characters in your passwords. That is beneficial, but only if the characters in your passwords are effective. Over 80% of cybersecurity incidents are caused by bad passwords. Knowing the substantial criteria to create a valid password is essential to keeping a powerful front-line of defense in the face of cybercrimes. Today we are going to take a look at what are the "Dos" and "Don'ts" for strong passwords.

The Global pandemic which we are living has affected every aspect of our world. One area that many probably don't think about being affected is the Dark Web. The current state of the Dark Web has a significant impact on the security of our businesses. When considering the Dark Web and the threat it posed before COVID-19, the risk was high, but our world's uncertainty has pushed the Dark Web even darker. Before our Global Pandemic, there were more than 4.5 billion web pages. If you include the entire internet, including the Dark Web, the estimated size is 400-500 times larger. The Dark Web offers approximately 75,000 terabytes of data, and 57% of those sites include illicit material, and 60% of said data could be harmful to organizations. Now, if this doesn't frighten you enough, continue reading as the negative changes in the dark web post-pandemic are worse than a terrifying horror film.

September is traditionally an exciting month for Apple and Apple addicts. The Apple new product release this week was similar to years past and did not disappoint. This shining light came through as the uplifting news that 2020 needed. The spotlight this year had a much needed focus on health and affordability. I think we all can agree that affordability and health is a breath of fresh air that we all are craving. The newly released products included fitness, health monitoring and power without a hefty price.

“If you don’t know where you’ve come from. You don’t know where you’re going.” This quote by Maya Angelou was not explicitly quoted regarding technology, although the relevancy is powerful. Technology progresses exponentially, and so to understand how far we have come, we need to understand where we began. This week, in 1956, the very first commercial hard drive was released. It was the IBM 350 Disk Storage Unit Model 1, and it was the size of two refrigerators. This ground-breaking technology weighed around a ton and could store about 4-5 megabytes of data. Today, a device the size of an old compact disk case can hold over 10 Terabytes of data. That is over 1,000,000 times the storage of the originally released hard drive. Although hard drives aren’t as vital as they used to be now that we have cloud storage, it is an essential piece of history to learn where we came from and where we are today.

The Global pandemic of which we are living has changed the world in so many ways. It has altered the way we work, the way our children learn, and most everything we do in our day-to-day lives. One thing it hasn't put a damper on is innovation. We are continuing to see incredible technology pop-up everywhere. Some of the innovations are in response to the current world we live in, and others are brand new, entirely out of the box thinking that is popping up in new devices, software, and applications. Today we are looking at a few of the new devices that are blowing our minds.

September has traditionally been the month when Apple releases the new iPhone and many other exciting technologies. As we near the month of September, it seems irresponsible to not discuss Apple’s rumored announcements. We have seen hints about a new Apple Watch, a more cost effective iPad and high-end headphones.

The novelty of virtual meetings has worn off, but it is apparent they are our new “normal.” Our current need for distance and safety has made virtual meetings a must, although because they have worked, businesses are signing up to keep them long term. Big companies like Google and Facebook have announced that most of their employees will be working remotely until late 2021, demonstrating that most of us can do our jobs from anywhere. So we are thrilled that Microsoft is giving us as many options to make our virtual meetings even more productive.