How To Make Data Protection a Competitive Advantage

by Hannah Grace Holladay / February 15, 2023

In 2022, data protection is (or should be) a top priority for any business that collects sensitive data, whether that’s personally identifiable information (PII), financial data, intellectual property, or business information. Regulatory compliance is often the primary motivation for implementing a data protection strategy. The penalties for non-compliance with HIPAA, the GDPR, PCI DSS,  the CCPA, and other data privacy regulations can damage or even destroy a small or medium…

10 S3 Best Practices for Improving AWS Security

by Hannah Grace Holladay / April 12, 2023

The Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) celebrated its 15th birthday in 2021. S3 was conceived as a straightforward scalable object storage system developers could use without concerning themselves with files systems—everything on S3 is an addressable object in a bucket. S3 quickly rose to dominate the object storage space. Because it is used everywhere, AWS S3 security as well as the privacy and confidentiality of the data businesses store…

Testing MFA Controls: Learning from the CISA Cybersecurity Advisory

by Hannah Grace Holladay / June 14, 2023

You thought you did everything right. You enabled multi-factor authentication (MFA) on all of your accounts and configured it so that all employees and customers are required to use it. You have automated checks set up to make sure MFA is still required. And yet you still experience a data breach. This is exactly what happened to the non-governmental organization (NGO) described in the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and…

How to Prevent Ransomware

by Hannah Grace Holladay / June 14, 2023

Ransomware is perhaps the most disruptive and infuriating security threat facing businesses in 2022. A ransomware infection is a symptom of an information and infrastructure security failure that may hurt a business’s reputation and pose a compliance risk. Ransomware not only deprives a business of data essential to its operations; it also forces business leaders to decide whether to pay off criminals—an action that has ethical, financial, and legal implications.…

6 Steps to Prevent Data Breaches

by Hannah Grace Holladay / June 14, 2023

As we enter a new year, it’s traditional to look back at the successes and failures of the last twelve months. The information security world is no different, and as the year draws to a close, information security writers publish a flurry of articles with titles like The Top Data Breaches of 2021 and The Top 5 Scariest Data Breaches in 2021. They are sobering reading: each listicle entry represents…