It’s that time of year where people all over the world take time out of their busy lives to let those around them know how much they’re loved. Critics of Valentine’s Day say we should practice love every day, not just once a year. While we love the opportunity to pause and spread love, we’re also reminded of how the same daily practice is true for cybersecurity. There’s one month out of an entire year dedicated to cybersecurity awareness, and its goal is to make cybersecurity best practices a daily habit

The world of IT has become more complex over the years. If you've ever wondered what IT god you aggravated for cybersecurity to be thrown into the mix and become ever-increasing in priority and complexity, you aren’t alone. There always seems to be some new exploit tactic popping up, new acronyms to be defined, or redefined, and new products to protect your business against new vulnerabilities. How do they all apply to you and what should you be focusing on? While each organization is different, here are the cybersecurity lessons we’ve learned over the past year.

As we head into the New Year and I pull together the last security blog of 2018, I want to highlight a few of the latest exploits and breaches that showed up on my security news radar during Thanksgiving week and the important questions they pose. Don’t head into 2019 without asking yourself these top cybersecurity questions:

As the cyberthreat landscape continues to rapidly evolve and get more complex, it’s become imperative for organizations to build a network architecture that includes automated cybersecurity monitoring systems, workforce education, training, and awareness. This will help to dynamically detect and prevent threats that may or may not have been knowingly introduced internally and provide increased visibility and protection to all outsider threats.

We’ve had the great pleasure of working with the Charlotte and Raleigh FBI Cyber Squad units as a part of our quarterly Security User Groups in the Charlotte and Triangle areas respectively. Whether you’ve had the opportunity to attend one of the user groups where the FBI has been our guest panelist or not, here’s a recap of what cybersecurity trends they’re seeing and other recommendations they have.

“Hurry up and deploy the gear. We have a deadline. Just get it done. We’ll go back later to lock it down.” Sound familiar? For years now, it’s been commonplace for network engineers to do just this. Except, someone rarely goes back to “lock it down”. There are countless ways to improve network security, but today we’ll focus on the low-hanging fruit by providing you with ten simple practices.