Which costs more ?

As a small to midsize business (SMB) owner in today’s economy, having a website and being connected to the Internet is essential. But a quick look through recent headlines is enough to scare most sane people into not taking the risk.

The last year has seen an unprecedented number of cyber breaches and incidents in the healthcare industry. In August 2016, 8.8 million healthcare records were exposed or stolen. That’s on top of the 11 million records exposed in June 2016. With numbers like these, it’s imperative you maintain your site’s HIPAA compliance.

If you are like me and the other 21 Million Americans whose data was part of the OPM breach, you are probably wondering what you can do about it. There are countless services out there for protecting you against identity theft. Some of them have some merit. Others do not. Mostly, all they can do is monitor your credit and hope to catch something soon AFTER it happens. But how about preventing it from ever happening?

It has been said that with technology advancing at such an incredible rate, if there is a day you don’t learn something new, you are going backwards.  So how do you keep up with what is current? There are plenty of social media sites where you can see news your friends and colleagues find interesting or important or you could try an RSS reader. But here’s what I use: Flipboard.

A quick look at the Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) web site will tell you that the number one vulnerability to web applications is “Injection”.  This means that an attacker is able to literally inject some piece of code or data into the target website. In the majority of cases, this is an application programming problem.

One of my favorite thoughts on gun control is: "If guns are outlawed, only the outlaws will have guns." With all this talk in the media about giving law enforcement agencies the ability to access all encrypted data, how is it that no one has recognized that the same is true for encryption? Even if every government in the world suddenly agreed on a framework for ensuring their access to encrypted data, terrorists and criminals are not going to use that framework. The outlaws will probably rejoice.