On Feb. 5, 2021, a hacker accessed computer systems at the Oldsmar, FL, water treatment facility and raised the level of sodium hydroxide (lye) in the water to more than 100 times the normal level. Fortunately, an alert employee noticed the change and reversed it before there was any adverse effect.
Cybersecurity
Modern businesses depend on the Internet more than ever — analysts say global Internet usage has increased by an astonishing 1,355 percent since 2020. That increased online presence has been a boon for hackers and other malicious actors, with one recent study estimating that 85 percent of all malware is now delivered via web browsing.
The trend toward remote and mobile work was already picking up steam prior to 2020. The pandemic accelerated this shift and, in many cases, organizations didn’t have time to secure their endpoints. Today, employees are using their own devices and accessing resources through the cloud more than ever, but endpoint security is still lagging behind.
The latest update to the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) is the first since 2018. That’s an eternity in the world of industry regulations and the technology required to satisfy those regulations. As a result, it should be no surprise that the new standard, PCI DSS 4.0, brings major changes. Any organization that handles cardholder data should be reviewing it now so they can start the process of becoming compliant.
In an era of distributed computing environments, software-defined WAN (SD-WAN) has emerged as the most efficient way to manage the increased network traffic and intensified connectivity demands required to link rising numbers of people, devices and applications. The benefits are so compelling that some industry analysts anticipate triple-digit growth of the SD-WAN market over the next year.
