“The knock-on effect of a data breach can be devastating for a company. When customers start taking their business—and their money—elsewhere, that can be a real body blow.” – Christopher Graham

In January 2021, we witnessed the largest ransomware demand in history: the $50 million ransom demand from Acer by REvil gang. Although the actual amount paid will be considerably less then the original demand it is still extremely lucrative for cybercrimals.

One of the biggest problems with traditional user ID and password login is the need to maintain a password database. Whether encrypted or not, if the database is captured it provides an attacker with a source to verify their guesses at speeds limited only by their hardware resources. Given enough time, a captured password database will fall.

As processing speeds of CPUs increase, brute force attacks have become a real threat. GPGPU cracking can produce more than 500,000,000 passwords per second even on lower end gaming hardware. Depending on the software, it can take as little as 160 seconds to crack a 14-character alphanumeric password. A password database alone does not stand a chance against such methods when it is a real target of interest.

“If you put a key under the mat for the cops, a burglar can find it, too. Criminals are using every technology tool at their disposal to hack into people’s accounts. If they know there’s a key hidden somewhere, they won’t stop until they find it.” Tim Cook

In the game of cat and mouse between data security and bad actors, extended detection and response (XDR) is the latest weapon that organizations can utilize to strengthen their security posture.

XDR is a new approach to threat detection and response, a key element in defending an organization’s infrastructure and data from damage or unauthorized access and misuse. 

The talk of data protection, data breaches, and cyber security won't be going away anytime soon. As a rising threat all over the world, it's become more important than ever before to gain a deeper understanding of these trends and the short and long-term effects they could have on your business. 

Data loss and natural disasters have increased the importance of having a well planned and effective IT disaster strategy for your business. New capabilities provide companies of all sizes the potential for a less costly, faster and more flexible recovery solution for backing up data.

Securing sensitive data is one of the greatest challenges faced by many organizations of all sizes. Increasing regulatory demands and the constantly changing threat landscape have brought data security to the forefront of IT issues. Several of the more important data security threats are related to the protection of the storage environment, where drive loss and theft are primary risk factors.