Sue Poremba

The Evolution of Cyber Attacks It’s easy for news to be missed in the days leading up to a holiday weekend when everyone’s in a hurry for some relaxation time. Cybersecurity, of course, never goes on vacation. In fact, it isn’t unusual for there to be a major breach or other incident during holiday lulls […]

Spear Phishing, Targeted Attacks and Data Breach Trends One of my favorite episodes of Friends shows Chandler checking his email on Ross’s laptop. Suddenly, Chandler’s face goes blank and he begins pounding his fingers on random keys, muttering, “Oh no, oh no.” He admitted to opening an email from someone he didn’t know because it […]

The Evolution of Cyber Attacks I was watching a news program last night, and the discussion of the most recent attack on the New York Times came up. Hackers, believed to be the Syrian Electronic Army, disrupted service to the site on Tuesday, and as of Wednesday at noon, the site was slowly being revived. […]

Five Questions to Ask When Choosing a Vulnerability Management System The one message from security experts that I’ve heard repeated throughout my security writing career is that network and IT security require a layered approach. You can’t use one security technique and expect that one thing to handle all of your security. A new study […]

The Department of Energy was hacked. Again. It is the second time this year that the DOE was the victim of a breach. The breach took place in, and it is believed that the personally identifiable information (PII) of 14,000 present and former employees was potentially compromised. Defense contractor Northrop Grumman recently announced that it, too, suffered a similar […]

About a month ago, ThreatTrack Security released a study showing that most C-level executives didn’t trust the cybersecurity capabilities in their own company. For instance, more than two-thirds of executives expressed concern on whether their company would be able to stop an attack or security threats. As Chet Wisniewski, senior security advisor, Sophos, said to […]

The Latest Attacks Challenging Website Protection Strategies While I was on vacation a few weeks ago, I observed my brother-in-law helping his mom with her new smartphone. He recommended that she password-protect it, and he began to explain why before she interrupted him. “Another password?” she grumbled. “How am I supposed to remember another password?” […]

Five Questions to Ask When Choosing a Vulnerability Management System The Department of Energy was hacked. Again. It is the second time this year that the DOE was the victim of a breach. The breach took place in July (I’m impressed that the DOE came public with the breach in under a month), and it […]

C-Level Executives Lack Confidence in Their Cybersecurity It’s easy to get fooled by phishing scams, especially spearphishing attacks that are so well targeted. But are certain people more susceptible to falling for a phishing email than others? That’s what a group of researchers from North Carolina State University wanted to find out. In a study […]

C-Level Executives Lack Confidence in Their Cybersecurity Content Management Sites (CMS) have become popular tools for businesses using the cloud. A CMS allows you to create e-commerce sites, blogs – pretty much anything you need to reach out to your customer base. The problem is that hackers also like the sites because of their spotty […]

New Technologies Surpass Compliance as Driver for Organizations to Secure Data With our children and many of us getting ready to go back to school, it’s a good time to ask: How secure are our school records? One of the stories that floated under the wire this summer was the number of colleges that announced […]

With the security and hacking conferences Black Hat and DefCon under way in Las Vegas, most of the news hitting the airwaves involves the NSA, Edward Snowden and government surveillance programs. DefCon organizers pointedly asked government officials to stay away, which I did not agree with. I believe we need dialogue between the two sides […]