In March of 2020, work as we knew it instantly changed. We were used to an office environment where physical office space was the norm. Virtual meetings were the exception and were primarily used when clients were distant and travel was impossible. Although more and more companies had made working virtually more acceptable, the trend was merely beginning. The global pandemic of COVID-19 changed all of this. Many will look back on this year and remember it as a disaster. However, because of the challenging world pandemic, technology quickly evolved and was adopted faster than would have ever happened.

The question is not whether you should have multifactor authentication (MFA); instead, what type? MFA is utterly essential when it comes to your business and personal data security. In the world of multifactor authentication, not all avenues are created equal. Although having something is better than nothing, in this case, that is not the attitude that you should have concerning your security. In 2016, NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) proposed restricting the use of SMS or voice for MFA, and although they softened their approach, they still do not recommend this method of MFA. Microsoft recently began campaigning against using SMS or voice for MFA. Today we are going to look at why the big push and what avenue is best for MFA.

Cybersecurity is a term we discuss broadly. It was discovered in 2019 that the average sophisticated cyberattack costs an organization $13million. With this extreme financial consequence, you can understand why we focus on cybersecurity education and prevention. We know the dangers of cyberattacks, although are you aware of what started the Cybersecurity Industry? This week we hit the thirty-second anniversary of the first sophisticated computer worm. How did this "research project" meant to determine the Internet's size end up taking down 10% of the Internet within 24 hours?

Many of us began our “Work from Home” adventure back in March. Some have trickled back into the office since, although many are still at home adjusting to what may be their new standard way to work. At first, many enjoyed the time saver of not having to commute and the ability to work in sweatpants. Unfortunately, over time we have recognized that the work/life boundaries have been blurred or even completely disappeared. Our days now include more on-screen time with 48% more chats a week with 69% more of those occurring “after hours." Our commute used to define our day with a build-up and wind-down that began and ended our day. Without this designated time, employees feel more burnout and exhaustion as the day never has a true beginning or end. Instead, it feels as if the workday is constant through our “work” hours and “home” hours. These blurred lines of work and home life may offer more time to work, although it has led to less workplace productivity.

Many business owners - and the IT professionals they rely on - focus on protecting their companies from external threats – the lone hacker out for a large ransom, the industry competitor pilfering secrets, or organized cyber-criminals with sophisticate phishing schemes, etc. But what about internal threats? Organizations sometimes fail to consider the true risks that insiders pose to their cybersecurity. Yet, internal risks are every bit as dangerous and damaging as the external ones, even if there is not malicious intent. The 2019 IBM Cost of Data Breach survey revealed that 24 percent of all data breaches in the past five years were the result of negligent employees or contractors.1 Another report, Insider Data Breach Survey, found that 60 percent of executives felt employees who made mistakes while rushing to complete tasks were the primary cause of internal breaches. Another 44 percent pointed to a lack of general awareness as the second most common reason, and 36 percent cited inadequate training for their organization’s security tools as a close third.2 To drive home the full harm of insider threats, we’ve compiled five actual case studies of internal actors who’ve wreaked financial and reputational damage when they got careless, or abused their knowledge and positions for personal gain.

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.