Business has evolved rapidly in the last few months, and remote working is one of the many changes which seem set to stay. But while we take advantage of new opportunities, so too are cyber-attackers. Our new-found flexibility comes at a cost. Businesses must rapidly adapt to changes to provide the digital infrastructure and processes we now require. And until all the right pieces are in place to ensure cyber resilience, we are at increased risk of attack.

Using technology to crack passwords is not a new concept. In fact, if you think back to how Alan Turing cracked Enigma during World War II, as shown in The Imitation Game, the same principles exist today.

Last week, it was reported that as many as 30,000 governmental and commercial organizations had become compromised in an attack against Microsoft Exchange Server. More recently, this number has doubled to 60,000 known victims globally — many of which appear to be small and medium-sized businesses that depend on the email software. By the time you read this post, it is likely even more organizations will have been affected.

Employees are often considered the weakest link in the security chain. For this reason, many organizations focus their efforts on educating, training and implementing protocols for their own staff when evaluating data privacy plans. While internal threats are certainly a tangible concern, this internal-focused approach fails to recognize another leading cybersecurity threat: vendors.

This blog is the first in a two-part series about Ransomware and how you may be able to protect your organization — big or small — against the same. Part one of this series will define ransomware and how it works. Part two of this series will provide tips on how you can protect your business against ransomware.

Chris Plauschinn began his career in the technology realm with Commonwealth Legal before it was acquired by Ricoh in 2014. Now the Director of Cloud and Infrastructure Solutions, Chris oversees both the public and private cloud infrastructure that powers the software solutions offered by Ricoh Canada.

Editor’s Note: This post was originally published on December 12, 2019. Updated and republished on January 11, 2021.

Bad data is typically categorized as erroneous, duplicative, personal or sensitive in nature, but there's more to it than that. Bad data can also be defined as anything that is stored in an outdated or non-functional legacy software, kept for the purposes of record keeping. Whether it’s the nature of its contents or how it’s being stored, most organizations are increasingly faced with managing the complexities of bad data. What’s worse, the practice of retaining dirty data can cost organizations billions of dollars each year if they are in violation of information and data management policies and procedures.