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.

Let’s talk a little bit about deepfakes. If you aren’t aware of this technology, deepfakes are essentially synthetic media. Typically they come in the form of videos or images that use artificial intelligence (AI) to replace a person’s likeness with another’s. With deepfake technology, people can convince an audience that a person said something they didn’t say. This deliberate digital subterfuge can bring with it a whole lot of problems. This week we will outline a few of them.

It’s an unfortunate fact that cybercriminals are motivated to attack places that contain large volumes of sensitive data, but typically lack the budget or in-house skills to sufficiently protect it. It’s even more unfortunate that this description directly applies to many schools and school systems.

Let’s talk about what schools have to offer cybercriminals, and what they need to do as a result.

As technology continues to advance, businesses inevitably encounter challenges and technical issues. In such scenarios, an IT help desk plays a pivotal role. Let’s delve into the operations of an IT help desk and elucidate why it stands as a valuable asset for any business.

It’s borderline impossible to conduct any business online without seeing potential threats abound. It also doesn’t help that threats tend to disguise themselves to avoid being detected. Today, we want to share a social media threat that one of our employees discovered while going about their day, and we think even a cautious user could have been fooled by it.

The cloud is an amazing tool for just about any business, allowing for countless benefits that span endless possibilities. However, because it involves the Internet and hosting data in an online environment, there are security challenges that naturally come about as a result of utilizing it. Let’s consider some of the security mistakes that businesses can experience while using the cloud.

In today’s interconnected world, an organization dedicated to fraud protection like the United States Federal Trade Commission is vital, especially when you consider how advanced digital technology has become and continues to grow. The FTC works to ensure consumer data stays protected by the businesses to which they entrust it. Let’s look at the Safeguards Rule and what your business should know about it.

For today’s business, there are very few threats that are as pervasive as cyberthreats. For this reason organizations that are willing to invest in their cybersecurity seem to have more control over their data and operations. With cyberthreats constantly evolving and becoming more sophisticated, it is crucial to equip ourselves with the right tools to protect our digital assets. In this week’s blog post, we will explore some of the most important cybersecurity tools that every individual and organization should consider implementing.

Viruses and malware are bad. Ransomware is crippling. Data breaches in some cases can more or less shut down a business. We talk about these threats all the time, but for most people, they are just scary-sounding buzzwords. Today, we want to talk about the more personalized threats that are much more cunning, and in some ways, much more dangerous.

Business doesn’t always go the way you want it to. There are numerous places that can cause problems and ruin the good thing you have going. This month, we discuss some of the most common problems we see small businesses have to confront regarding their technology. 

Does your business rely on the strength of its information systems? If so, you understand just how important cybersecurity is to the health of your organization. In a near-constant attempt to maintain organizational cybersecurity, many organizations have started changing the way that they approach data and network security, by moving their security efforts to the edge of their network. This is called edge security, and there are some very intriguing benefits.

If you have never imagined your business in the crosshairs of enemy hackers, you could be in for a rude awakening. Unauthorized access to important business data could be enough to bring your business’ operations grinding to a halt, among other consequences. You need to focus your efforts on security, including protecting your infrastructure and ensuring its redundancy through data backup systems.

It’s a Tuesday morning after a long weekend. You come into the office and note that a couple employees are struggling to log into their machines. You don’t think much of it. You go to your office, set your coffee down, and try to log into your desktop. It fails. 

Your first thought is that your whole day just went sideways. That’s just the start of it.

Cybersecurity is a critical consideration for businesses to make, as it isn’t hyperbolic to say that a cyberthreat could potentially end a business. Trust me, as a business owner myself, I’m not thrilled about the reality of the situation, but it’s too important for us not to discuss.

Have you ever considered the importance of client-side encryption for your Gmail and your Calendar? If you implement it, you can create meetings and send or receive emails that have been encrypted before they are sent to Google’s servers. Organizations using Google Workspace Enterprise Plus, Education Standard, and Education Plus can expect this client-side encryption tool, but personal users will be left in the dust.

The advancement of technology has brought a tremendous change for education. The use of modern IT and proper IT management can greatly improve schools, making learning more effective, while keeping students safer. In this article, we will discuss some of the benefits modern technology has, and how security is a huge factor when it comes to students' academic success.

Let me ask you one thing: how secure is your business? 

Security has become a multifaceted beast. There’s the traditional surveillance that involves cameras and video recording equipment, but even that has made major shifts over the last few years with modern digital technologies and cloud storage. Then there’s physical security—door locks, pin pads, biometrics, and more. Modern versions of physical security tie in with the rest of your network and offer a huge wealth of security features and insights. The challenging part is making sense of it all without getting overwhelmed or spending too much.

Phishing is the most widespread attack vector for modern day hackers. They are continuously evolving, getting more and more sophisticated, and therefore more dangerous. In this month’s newsletter, we are going to go through what makes a phishing attack and how to give your organization the best chance at keeping them from being a major problem for your business. 

Ransomware is perhaps the nastiest threat you can encounter, and the unprepared business could potentially be crippled beyond repair if it suffers from an attack like this. We’re here to demystify the inner machinations of a ransomware attack so you know better how to respond to it.

Keep Your Business Insurance Payments Low: Invest in Modern Cybersecurity Best Practices

If you’ve recently renewed your business insurance, or you are about to, you might have noticed that your insurance provider is starting to ask you questions about your overall IT security. Depending on how you answer these questions, they may increase your premiums or choose to not cover your business at all. This raises the question—how can my Maryland business lower my insurance costs and properly protect my business from cyberattacks?