Latest in Phone Scams
As a pretty security savvy IT person, "Yours Truly" was almost stung this morning. I answered an incoming cell call from an Ontario phone number. Very quickly, a recorded message began with a North American digitized voice in perfect English telling me that I had 2...
Ransom Attack Hits DC Police Department
Yesterday, May 13, 2021, the Washington DC's Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) reported a massive internal data breach. It was the worst ever ransomware attack on a US police department. Thousands of documents were posted to the dark web on Thursday. Included in...
Wi-Fi 6 Is Here! Should I Care?
Wi-Fi 6 is coming very soon. Why should you care? Your house and smaller office probably runs very well on Wi-Fi 5.1 In that case, don't worry about replacing your routers any time soon. A Look to the Future Wi-Fi 6 is for more demanding uses: Maximum speed should be...
May the Force Be With You
Star Wars fans recognize this greeting and celebrate it every May 4th. A post-incident assessment of Rogue One's breach of the Galactic Empire's datastore on the planet Scarif was recently conducted. It found a number of critical cyber weaknesses in Imperial Security....
The Future of Work
With vaccination levels rising (at least across the wealthier nations of the world), life and work will return to normal. Or will it? 30% of American workers say that they'll quit their jobs if they're forced to go back to the office full-time. 71% of white collar...
Do Our Patching Cycles Need to Change?
Best practice has been to patch systems--both operating systems and applications--every 28-30 days (a month). Some don't even do it this often (as shown by the recent Microsoft Exchange hack). This cycle is based on the practice that Microsoft and other vendors...
When the Gaming Gets Real
Being a business services company, Atlas doesn't serve a lot of gamers. But sometimes a working parent wants to protect all the computers in their home, not just theirs. Sometimes those computers belong to gamers. And some gamers want to load software that gets around...
Is Your Cloud Data at Risk?
There is a widespread misconception that data created and stored in Google Workspace does not need to be backed up. While Google certainly has you covered when it comes to any outages on their part, recovering data due to accidental or malicious deletion is your...
Computer Manufacturer ACER Hit with $50 M Ransom
Acer, one of the world's largest computer manufacturers, was hit with a $50 million dollar ransomware attack. It is the largest ransomware demand currently known. Rumours have surfaced that attackers gained access to Acer's systems through the Microsoft Exchange...
What the Heck is Credential Stuffing?
How many passwords do you use? 1? 2? 5? Most people use a small number of passwords over and over again. There are people who only have a single password for every site they visit: email, banking, Canadian Revenue Agency, social media, dating sites--everything. It's...