It’s easy to talk about the benefits of using a cloud platform rather than in-house or colocated hardware. In 2017, few would question those benefits. But it can be challenging to see a path from a company’s current infrastructure to the cloud. Moving complex and critical legacy applications is a big step, and without executive […]
MongoDB is a popular NoSQL database with a serious problem. Tens of thousands of MongoDB databases have been hacked by criminals, who replace the data with a simple message: “Send us money or your data is gone forever”. In fact, calling it a hack is overly generous, since there’s very little hacking involved: the databases […]
Choosing a strong password is critical to securing your account. Strong and secure passwords can also be a pain, which is why many of us can fall into the bad habit of sharing a password or two across many different accounts. This practice, while helpful in remembering our passwords, makes us more susceptible to attacks […]
Traditionally, phishing attacks have targeted consumers with random spam in the hope that that some small proportion of the targets are naive enough to install malicious software or hand over login details.
Most cloud platforms are as resilient as an old bridge! On December 15, 1967, the Silver Bridge connecting West Virginia to Ohio collapsed during rush hour with horrific results. In the ensuing investigation, the cause was discovered to be the failure of a single supporting member. When the bar failed, the bridge collapsed. In the […]
If I offered you $10 now and $15 next week, which would you choose? Depending on your personality, you might think the obvious choice is to wait until next week and get 50% more money, but studies in psychology have shown that the majority of people take the money and run. The effect is called […]
Passwords have proven themselves an inadequate method of authentication many times. It’s not necessarily that the concept is flawed: passwords can be secure if the system around them is implemented properly. But a combination of users’ inability to properly choose and manage passwords and developers’ failure to implement secure systems often leads to security breaches.
There are three main planks to any secure system: technology, policy, and education. If any one of these is lacking, maintaining data security over the long term is next to impossible. A technological solution is worthless if no one knows how to use it and why it should be used. Even if they do know […]
This October, some the biggest websites and online service providers in the world went offline. Twitter, Reddit, GitHub, AirBNB and a host of other companies were essentially out of business for a few hours. The culprit: a massive Distributed Denial of Service attack against a key infrastructure provider.
It’s a truism that companies have more data than at any other time in history. They have more ways of collecting, generating, and storing data than ever before. Because of cloud storage, data lakes can expand almost indefinitely and no one has to look at the hard drives piling up.
