On Wednesday, April 10, 2024, Apple deemed it necessary to send a rare alert to certain users via email, spread out across 92 nations. As Apple’s website states, these threat notifications “are designed to inform and assist users who may have been individually targeted by mercenary spyware attacks.” Let’s review these attacks so we all understand this threat better.

Scams are a scary prospect, and with today’s technology and current events being what they are, it’s all the more important that you remain aware of them so you can avoid them. With a whole year ahead of us, let’s consider some scams and scam-based trends that will likely continue throughout.

Back in July, the White House secured commitments from Amazon, Anthropic, Google, Inflection, Meta, Microsoft, and OpenAI to help manage the risks that artificial intelligence potentially poses. More recently, eight more companies—Adobe, Cohere, IBM, Nvidia, Palantir, Salesforce, Scale AI, and Stability—also pledged to maintain “the development of safe, secure, and trustworthy AI,” as a White House brief reported.

A ransomware attack took out the computer network of Atlantic General Hospital, as was discovered on January 29th of this year. While the situation was resolved as of February 13th and the impacted departments returned to full operation, there are bound to be lasting ripples that will continue on for some time.

In recent months, publicly-accessible AI tools have ignited interest in using artificial intelligence amongst businesses, and for good reason. While these tools are very, very limited in what they can do—which we will discuss here for sure—they still show enormous potential.

However, this potential introduces a few major questions to the conversation. Let’s examine some of them.

When cyberattacks hit close to home; when an attack affects a large number of people, it really shows you just how much risk a business could be facing by not being prepared. Over Thanksgiving, a cybersecurity incident hit the Washington County government, and as of this writing, several services are still paused while things are getting restored.

It’s easy to focus on WHAT people should be doing to prevent themselves from becoming victims of cybercrime, but it’s just as easy to ignore the advice from experts while thinking “nah, that won’t really affect me.”

The thing is, you HAVE to be aware of these threats, and you have to take measures to protect yourself. We’re going to drop the dramatic language here, and focus on breaking the threats down so it’s easier to be more aware of them, and hopefully make it easier to navigate and circumvent a world that has a growing amount of cyber threats.

With 2023 sneaking up on us, you’ll need to consider the many challenges that businesses will face as we move into the new year. Many of these challenges can be remedied simply by implementing the right technology solutions, too!

You might have spotted some news saying that Microsoft Windows 8 and Server 2012 are soon to reach their End of Life date… in fact, you probably heard it from us. However, not everyone may really know what this means, and how it can impact their organizations. In light of this, we wanted to give some context as to what a software title or operating system’s “End of Life” is, and what needs to happen in preparation for it.

In May of 2021, Ireland’s Health Service Executive, which handles healthcare and social services to the Emerald Isle’s nearly five million residents, was the target of a massive ransomware attack. Even as businesses and municipalities from all over the globe have been dealing with this plight, we mention this because of the aftereffects of this situation. Today, we take a look at the situation and what can be learned from it.