Impacting as many as 500 million customers, Marriott’s data breach is one of the largest in history. While we don’t yet know the root cause of the breach (which impacts hotels within the Starwood Group and is believed to predate Marriott’s acquisition of the group); what surprised many people is just how long the door was left open for the attackers – four years in total!
The lack of end-to-end encryption in Skype has long been a concern for security conscious business users. However, in August 2018 Microsoft announced the availability of Private Conversations, offering users the ability to protect chats, calls and file sharing with end-to-end encryption built on the Signal protocol.
We’ve spoken about the importance of secure client communications before. From an accidental leak of information, to a malicious cyber-attack, compromising client confidentiality can result in the sort of reputation damage that can be hard to come back from. But while organizations understand this, too often we find employees defaulting back to less secure communication methods. Why? It comes down to two key factors.
Nowadays, the press doesn’t have to look too far for the next cyber attack story! Whether it’s the surprise theft of customer data, like British Airways suffered this year, or a fresh Facebook hack, if there’s one thing we’ve learned this year – no one, regardless of size and sophistication, is immune to attack.
Group conversations can get noisy – new ideas, status updates, answers to questions, the occasional joke. It can be easy to miss important info, or a question directed at you. The new mentions functionality highlights your name visually and makes it easy to scan the text and find the sections relevant to the reader. Searching for "@My Name" (replace it with your actual name, of course) returns all mentions of you giving everyone another way to search and filter the most important messages.
When Maersk, a global leader in shipping and logistics, was hit by the NotPetya ransomware attack in 2017, it not only found itself unable to manage day-to-day operations efficiently, but also unable to effectively inform the markets and its stakeholders of its response. Combined, the financial impact of NotPetya on Maersk is estimated to have exceeded USD$300m.
Whether it’s a malicious cyber attack, or a complete system outage; when disaster hits your network the immediate priority is to maintain business operations and resolve the issue. However, what you might not realize is that during this recovery period your business could be at even greater risk of a data breach, or malicious attempts to eavesdrop on your confidential discussions!
Has your business chosen an appropriate communication and file sharing tool that can be relied upon in the event of a complete network shutdown? While many businesses maintain a business continuity plan to help them assess potential threats to their organizations, surprisingly few specify the communications tools that should be used in the event of malicious cyber attack (or other a system outage), that renders the corporate network unavailable.
