In July 2019, leading financial organization Capital One received an anonymous e-mail revealing some bad news: “There appears to be some leaked data of yours in someone’s Github.” This leaked data was revealed to be the personal details of about 106 million individuals across the US and Canada, mostly consumers and small business owners that have applied for credit card...

We hear a lot about encryption in this day in age, particularly around it being the panacea for compliance with data protection regulations. It’s true it can be a component of an information security and compliance strategy, but there are a variety of different encryption options available on the market today, so care needs to be taken with selecting the right solution to ensure it doesn’t turn into a nightmare resulting in non-compliance.

It is vital that security measures match that of the technology introduced such as AI, 5G, and the Internet of Things.

Protecting your data using Clearswift’s Secure Web Gateway solution and Secure ICAP Gateway deployed in both forward- and reverse-proxy modes and used to mitigate advanced threats on web pages. It also helps keep your business compliant.

Social media is now the window to any business. 83% of organizations use social media as a marketing tactic, making it the most popular marketing tool. It is updated far more regularly than any website and businesses build a following based on publishing engaging content regularly. While businesses see the importance of using social media to quickly build their brand and reputation, there has been little emphasis on the downside to this. How social media can destroy a company’s reputation in an instant.

Optical Character Recognition (OCR) as a technology has been around for a long time. It inspects images for text and then decodes them. While the human eye is fantastic at recognizing text, be it upside down or at an angle, it is computationally intensive to do this by machine on a regular basis. However, new algorithms now exist to deal with skew (angled text) as well as being able to handle multiple languages. The latest versions of Clearswift’s email product portfolio – the SECURE Email Gateway (SEG), SECURE Exchange Gateway (SXG) and ARgon – have a new cost option for OCR to mitigate this risk.

Following the recent WannaCry attack that affected so many organizations, both public and private, across the globe, many firms are now taking steps to protect themselves from potential threats in the future. One establishment in the UK that the WannaCry attack had ramifications for was the NHS. The incident meant multiple hospitals across England and Scotland had to cancel...

From the latest set of statistics released as part of the Clearswift Insider Threat Index, the one that really caught my eye, was the fact that 35% of employees say they have access to information above their pay grade.

According to National Journal, “The Office of Personnel Management announced last week that the personal data for 21.5 million people had been stolen. But for national security professionals and cybersecurity experts, the more troubling issue is the theft of 1.1 million fingerprints.”

As many of you will have seen in the media last week Paddy Power announced a leak of almost 650,000 client’s details, dating back to 2010.

Not so long ago I wrote two blog posts on the Heartbleed vulnerability in OpenSSL. In one of them I alluded to the fact that we have not seen the end of it, unfortunately I was right.

Threats from outside the organization are still happening, but it's the threats from within which are causing a greater challenge. Not just employees but third parties who have access to internal systems and information.

The management of information is primarily the owner’s responsibility and secondly the responsibility of all other stakeholders that may have a vested interest in the information, or the data owner. In a world where individuals and businesses are becoming engulfed in new data every day; personal ownership needs to take a more pro-active role in its management.

Credit card fraud in 2012 cost $5.55 billion worldwide. But there are other problems - is the way you handle credit card information sufficient?