OnSite I.T. Blog

Most traditional network security strategies rely on a premise that aged out around the same time as dial-up internet: if someone is physically inside your building—or connected to your VPN—they belong there. It is the digital equivalent of trusting anyone who walks past reception simply because they happen to be holding a coffee cup and wearing a lanyard.

In IT, we call this the "castle-and-moat" security model. Once you cross the moat, you have free rein over the kingdom. You can wander into accounting, browse HR files, and borrow the company secrets for the weekend.

Opening an invoice to find an ongoing list of surprise line items is a quick way to ruin a perfectly good cup of morning coffee. Unfortunately, that is standard practice for plenty of service providers who love to slap the phrase "flat-rate" on contracts that are anything but.

Security researchers have found that a sophisticated cyberespionage campaign delivered spyware to Al Jazeera journalists and others… without them ever clicking a link. The exploit, dubbed "AdFection," operated entirely through digital advertisements that simply had to load on a user's screen to execute the attack.

Let’s examine the situation and what it can tell us about cybersecurity moving forward.

What do you focus on when one of your team members leaves? When employees leave a company, business owners often focus on transitioning the daily workload. Unfortunately, this often overlooks an important fact: departed team members will frequently leave active digital credentials behind that quietly create massive security risks.

Let’s talk about it.

It’s that time of year when we all like to embrace the kinds of things that scare us—everything that goes bump in the night, makes our skin crawl, and turns our blood to ice. While most of the time, it is all in good fun, there’s always a hint of truth in the scary stories we tell that holds a crucial lesson. Sometimes, this lesson can even apply to our businesses.

Let’s reimagine an old standby as an example of such a story.