Ransomware has had quite an upswing in recent years, costing the world $20 billion in 2021 and in 2023 the projected damages from ransomware are expected to exceed $30 billion worldwide. Cases of ransomware have been increasing at an alarming rate to become one of the leading threats to thousands of businesses, organizations, and governments around the world. This trend shows very little sign of slowing down and will only increase in the coming years as access to hacking tools on the internet and dark-web becomes easier than ever before.

Today, the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services issued a bulletin to highlight the obligations of Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) on covered entities and business associates (“regulated entities”) under the HIPAA Privacy, Security, and Breach Notification Rules (“HIPAA Rules”) when using online tracking technologies.  These online tracking technologies, like Google Analytics or Meta Pixel, collect and analyze information about how internet users are interacting with a regulated entity’s website or mobile application.

The most integral part of an organization is its employee; however, user experience is often overlooked or underappreciated by many IT professionals. It’s a story we all are familiar with, “My PC is slow, and I cannot work.”, or the dreaded, “My PC keeps crashing ever since you installed that update.” No matter how robust we make the OS deployment, [we cannot control blah blah blah and…] having to reinstall due to an application or botched update costs time, both for IT and the end-user. Moving the desktop environment away from the workstation and into the datacenter can completely alleviate the situation.

Year after year, we are seeing the expansion of applications for Cyber Insurance. As the underwriters become more versed in the technical attributes of infrastructure security, they naturally have more questions. Often these questions lead to variables that will affect your premium based on your answer. At times the responses to your answers could double your premium or deny you access to certain riders.

More and more companies are moving to cloud services like Office 365 and G Suite each year, and many of them are under the impression that moving to the cloud means they no longer need to take backups.  The reality is that these services operate under a “Shared Responsibility Model” that puts the onus of ensuring your data and configurations are backed up on you.  This is important not just for the occasional accidental file deletion but also for major breaches and attacks.