Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

You may have noticed some URLs have the added S after “http.” This means a site has SSL security. SSL stands for Secure Sockets Layer. It keeps sensitive information, like social security numbers, credit card numbers, login credentials, or medical records, from being intercepted by encrypting the data while it passes between servers. Now, you might be thinking, if I don’t sell things online then I don’t need SSL security. Think again.

In the past few weeks, financial firms and governments have had to build and launch websites in a hurry — for a multitude of reasons including the emergency loan programmes that have been backed by various governments around the world including the USA and Europe.

Five worthy reads is a regular column on five noteworthy items we’ve discovered while researching trending and timeless topics. This week, we highlight the importance of creating and enforcing a solid cybersecurity strategy for employees who work remotely.

The Center for Internet Security (CIS) is a nonprofit organisation that uses a community-driven process to release benchmarks to safeguard enterprises against cyber attacks. It is one of the most recognised industry standards that provides comprehensive configuration checklists to identify and remediate security vulnerabilities in a computing environment.

This is a guest blog by Trent R.Hein, Co-CEO of Rule 4. Once in a while an opportunity comes along that brings out our inner geek like no other, which is what happened when Canonical asked if we’d be willing to review the overall cybersecurity model of Ubuntu Core and its ecosystem.

Identity theft is on the rise and it is not enough to simply stay on top of the latest trends in this arena to avoid falling victim to common cons; you need to be proactive to prevent sensitive information being stolen and used against you. This is where Identity Guard’s identity theft protection tool comes into play. It aims to deliver always-on protection from the biggest threats faced by innocent web users.

With so many people working from home, the perimeter of corporate data safety has suddenly grown very large, in many cases encompassing employee home computers. Data loss prevention (DLP) was challenging enough already, but now it takes on even more importance. One way that data can escape the corporate network is by getting copied to USB thumb drives. Some companies take the approach of gluing or epoxying the USB ports closed.

What do you think is the most important aspect of a company? Performance? Perhaps you’re thinking of profits. True, performance and profits are crucial. But security tops the list. Every company caters to different users regularly. But does the necessity of security change whether the user base is narrow or wide? Users have access to a lot of information, and often, this leads to the risk of unauthorized access and data breach.

Over 44 records are stolen per second every day due to data breaches, and according to the Risk Based Security Research report published in 2019, databases are the top most targeted assets for malicious actors to exploit organizations’ confidential data. Often, organizations don’t realize their databases have been compromised for months. Once sensitive data is leaked, the damage can’t be undone.