Talk about a shot heard ‘round the world. The so-called “Panama Papers” – a trove of data on money laundering and other financial shenanigans by the world’s wealthiest people – has already claimed several careers. The Prime Minister of Iceland had to resign. Russian oligarchs are scrambling for...
It’s a law of physics and politics at the same time: every action results in an equal and opposite reaction. In the case of the 2008 financial crisis, the reaction came in the form of the Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, which was signed...
Whenever a cybersecurity incident happens, people start pointing fingers. The I.T. staff is usually where most blame is assigned, at least to start. If only the right patch was in place, if only the anti-virus software had been updated, if only the network was monitored correctly –...
A leaked version of a Congressional bill on encryption has everyone up in arms – even though it hasn’t been officially introduced yet. The nine-page “discussion draft”, which had been cycling through a series of closed-door negotiations in the Senate for months, made its way into...
Innovation isn’t confined to the world of legitimate commerce and business. Criminals innovate too. That’s become all too apparent in the last month with the advent of new kinds of so-called “ransomware” attacks around the world. The idea of ransomware has been around for a decade or more. Yet...
Spring is traditionally the time when we de-clutter. Purging all of the stuff we just don’t need is spiritually satisfying, and it also serves as a reminder of what’s truly important to us. The healthy feeling you get from spring cleaning can extend to the technology side...
As long as there has been an internet, there have been internet scams and cybersecurity incidents. As long as there has been a tax system, there has been tax fraud of one sort or another. In a way, it’s surprising that it took so long for these...
It’s well known that prevention is the most effective and least costly form of cybersecurity. Once a breach happens, it can be very difficult to get back to “normal”, if such a thing even exists anymore. Better to augment that “normal” state with the most robust defense...
California’s prison system has the highest rate of recidivism in the nation. According to official statistics, over 65% of prisoners released from California penitentiaries will return to jail within three years. Many factors contribute to this daunting problem, but the lack of employment opportunity among former prisoners...
When hackers strike, it’s never pretty. Businesses are disrupted, customers lose faith, the brand suffers. And when it happens more than once, I.T. departments (and their superiors) start to ask more pointed questions. The issue shifts from “why did this happen?” to “what can we do to stop...
On March 1, a group of researchers working in academia and the tech sector released news that over a third of the servers on the internet are susceptible to having their secure traffic decrypted were it to be intercepted. Welcome to CVE-2016-0800, the DROWN attack. Anyone who’s been...
Scale Venture Partners was bogged down in the morass of cybersecurity. Like most companies today, they use a lot of different systems. As the layers of technology increased, so did the complexity of their security challenge. Additionally, their users were increasingly mobile, compounding the difficulty of keeping every...