Your Portland & Vancouver IT Information Source

Educational institutions around the world process and store student information using various forms of technologies. Technological advancements bring with them productivity and efficiency capabilities. However, they also bring important security concerns regarding confidential student information.

The CEO of Target revealed their Point-of-Sale (PoS) systems were infected with malware.  This resulted in the massive data breach that occurred over the holiday shopping season. Target’s data breach impacted nearly 110 million shoppers. 

Here’s What Happened.

Consumers have looked forward to wearable technology for years, and this year’s CES has labeled 2014 as the year of wearable tech. The Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2014 featured the biggest names in wearable tech, many making announcements to prepare consumers for wearable technology to come.

Every major browser offers some type of private browsing mode:

On Safari and Firefox, it’s called Private Browsing.
On Google Chrome, it’s called Incognito Mode.
On Internet Explorer, it’s called InPrivate.

These modes are designed to keep your online activity safe from prying eyes.

With technology advancements, older types of technology are fast becoming obsolete for today’s law firms. When ringing in the New Year consider replacing older technologies with new ones.

Traditional Fax Machines

While some employees still insist on using fax machines, virtual fax services are the preferred choice for law firms today.

After Target Corp. revealed its data breach, — Neiman Marcus confirmed that cybercriminals also stole their customers’ payment card information over the holiday season. This is the second retailer that suffered a cyber-security attack during this time period!   
Neiman Marcus was notified by its credit card processor about the unauthorized payment activity in mid-December.

A fast-moving, mutating computer virus is infecting even the most effectively protected IT systems. This swiftly morphing virus is getting past anti-virus protections and firewalls. — Reliance on them alone isn’t enough.

Each new mutated form of the virus is like a zero-day attack (such as the Cryptolocker virus). This means each strain of the virus has never been seen before by any organization.

Criminal malware developers have created a new ransomware program called PowerLocker.  PowerLocker is used to encrypt files on infected computers so cybercriminals can demand ransom fees from victims to recover the files. The new ransomware appears to be inspired by the success of Cryptolocker, a program that’s infected more than 250,000 computers since September 2013.

Similar to Cryptolocker, PowerLocker uses strong encryption to prevent the user from recovering stolen files.

Yahoo is improving their security for Yahoo Mail users with automatic encryption. On January 7th, Yahoo enabled automatic HTTPS as the default for all users on their network. Plus they now use 2,048-bit encryption keys to secure certificates for encrypted communications between Web browsers and servers.

Are you erasing ePHI (electronic protected health information) from your photocopier hard drives prior to disposing of them? If not, you could be assessed huge fines. On August 14th 2013, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and Office for Civil Rights (OCR) announced that Affinity Health Plan, Inc.