Sue Poremba

IT Industry Shellshocked in Q3: How to Plan for What’s Next It was announced yesterday that White House computers were hacked, most likely by Russian hackers. White House officials have stated that it was non-classified computers that were attacked and there is no cause for alarm. As Government Technology pointed out, staffers were given the […]

Using Tokenization for Superior Data Security News on the security front is not good. As 2014 comes into the home stretch, it seems like there is a security breach, a new vulnerability or some sort of attack every week. Yet, even with warnings of future threats—the FBI is warning businesses to expect an attack—it seems […]

How to Prevent Data from Being Breached A recently released Kaspersky Lab and INTERPOL survey found that 60 percent of the attacks on Android devices involve financial malware. In the report, Mobile Cyber Threats, the researchers provide a very simple reason for why this is: Smartphones and tablets are being used more and more frequently […]

Data at Risk: Super Scary Facts The Buggles song “Video Killed the Radio Star” came to mind today as I read headline after headline about Twitter’s plan to kill the password. Though the prediction that MTV would end the love of radio music wasn’t entirely true, the music video did change the way we looked […]

Key Security Considerations for Enterprise Cloud Deployments Companies, particularly small and medium-sized businesses, are embracing cloud computing. Security has long been the major hurdle to cloud adoption for many users, but is that changing? According to an infograph on cloud computing trends that I saw on PC World, it looks like SMBs have a new […]

Data at Risk: Super Scary Facts Security news has officially gone to the dogs. Well, at least, it has gone to the POODLE, this week’s variation of our regularly scheduled scary security vulnerability. This particular vulnerability is found in the SSL 3.0 encryption standard. POODLE stands for Padding Oracle On Downgraded Legacy Encryption, which is […]

Five Myths Holding Your Security Program Back Dairy Queen announced at the end of last week that nearly 400 of its stores were the victim of a breach. Does that sound familiar? Yes, as a few people wrote in email messages to me on Friday, Dairy Queen is this week’s “breach of the week.” However, […]

Five Myths Holding Your Security Program Back It’s October, and that means it is Cybersecurity Awareness Month. Sponsored by the Department of Homeland Security, this is the 10th anniversary of this awareness month, and I don’t think we’ve ever needed it more. Since Cybersecurity Awareness Month 2013, we’ve seen an unprecedented number of high-profile attacks […]

From a Hacker’s Perspective: How to Breach a Point-of-Sale System Two surveys have been released recently that show the way consumers think about enterprise data breaches. The first survey, conducted by HyTrust, isn’t surprising. It found that the majority of consumers will take their business elsewhere after discovering their information was compromised in a breach. […]

Data at Risk: Super Scary Facts Last year, I wrote a blog post about a Food and Drug Administration (FDA) warning regarding cybersecurity for the devices used in the health care industry. In part, that warning stated: The FDA expects medical device manufacturers to take appropriate steps to limit the opportunities for unauthorized access to […]

From a Hacker’s Perspective: How to Breach a Point-of-Sale System Whenever a breach of some sort occurs, two things tend to happen. First, the general password warning is given: Change them now, change them regularly, and don’t repeat passwords for anything. Second, people experience angst over password use in general. They often feel that the […]

Data at Risk: Super Scary Facts A new vulnerability has been discovered that some are calling bigger than Heartbleed. This one, called Bash or Shellshock (I’ve seen it called both equally), affects Linux, Unix and Mac OS X. Bash is a popular and frequently used system shell. As explained in an Ars Technica article: The […]