The IT Nerd

By Kim Del Fierro, VP of Marketing for Area 1 Security

Cybersecurity is a prevalent issue that’s received increased attention in many companies lately. And no wonder, since it’s continuously been a hot topic brought to the spotlight by the significant data breaches of the past few years.

The good news is that there are plenty of solutions that can help stop cybercriminals in their tracks. The bad news is that many companies don’t take the necessary precautions because they lack proper cybersecurity practices. That leaves them wide open to all sorts of malicious attacks. In prevention, businesses should first build a security culture from within, while ensuring they retain a strong security partner from outside the organization. Here are three steps to creating a culture of cybersecurity.

Aim to Disrupt

If your company’s security culture is at a low level, you’ll need to put in extra effort to change it for the better. That means you’ll have to be disruptive and work on improving the existing cybersecurity mindset of every individual you employ. The ultimate goal of this process is to give the power of knowledge to your employees and spread awareness of the common cybersecurity issues. Without awareness, it’s pointless to hold employees accountable for maintaining security. Humans will always be the weakest link in any system, but that doesn’t mean you should give up on cybersecurity education.

Engage Employees through Education

You can make sure your employees will go through the cybersecurity education process smoothly by making it engaging. Want to teach them all about Business Email Compromise (BEC) and Email Account Compromise (EAC) scams and how to recognize them? Don’t settle for a PowerPoint presentation they’re sure to forget next month.

Instead, make sure they have something to do while they learn —such as organize a competition or let them try getting into the hackers’ shoes. That way, your employees will have a better understanding of what they need to do to maintain security. By helping them learn actively, you will ensure that the knowledge they acquire lasts. No matter how strong your training, remember that it is never foolproof.

Invest to See a Return

Everything you invest in to improve your company’s cybersecurity practices should pay off down the line. If it doesn’t, then it’s ineffective. However, some things are always worth an investment. For example, creating a secure development lifecycle (SDL) is likely to have good ROI. An SDL will cover all the activities you need to perform for each system or software release, which can improve the effectiveness of your cybersecurity practices.

On the other hand, using services that prevent threats from ever reaching you can be even more beneficial. This primarily holds true for forms of attack that traditional defenses, such as firewall and antivirus, can’t stop. Phishing is the cause of 95 percent of data breaches, and with Area 1 Security’s Area 1 Horizon Anti-Phishing Service, you can be sure that any email, web, and network phishing attacks will stop before they become a problem.

We’ve reached the point where cybersecurity has to become an intrinsic part of all business processes. The organizations that fail to make it so eventually find their weaknesses exploited by cybercriminals. To prevent this, build a security culture within your organization and invest in solutions that can minimize or stop threats completely.

New research out of the University of Waterloo has found a novel method to extend the battery life of smartphones for up to an hour each day.

The researchers have developed an app which smartphone users can use to reduce the energy consumption of their devices without any significant impact on performance.

“The built-in multi-window feature released with the new Android operating system allows users to have multiple windows and files open at the same time similar to a laptop, but this results in unnecessary energy drain,” said Kshirasagar Naik, co-author of the study and a professor in Waterloo’s faculty of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

“We have developed an app which users can install on their devices and use to reduce the brightness of non-critical applications. So, when you’re interacting with one application, the brightness of the other window goes down thereby reduces the energy consumption of the device.”

The app was evaluated in an experiment involving 200 smartphone users, who downloaded the software on their devices and used it while they had multiple windows opened. It was found that when the energy saving technique was used it extended their battery life by 10 to 25 per cent.

“What happens now is that you put the phone on a charger for the night and when you leave home the next day the battery is at 100 per cent, but there is a lot of behind the scenes computation and communication going on, and it drains the battery,” said Naik. “By midday charge is reduced to 30 per cent. So, you need to charge the battery many times in a day, and from the user’s perspective that is a big pain.

“Due to the excess energy consumption, the phone becomes warmer and warmer while the frequent charging reduces the life of the battery. So, batteries that are meant to last for three years may have to be replaced in two years.”

The study, MultiDroid: An Energy Optimization Technique for Multi-Window Operations on OLED Smartphones, co-authored by Milind Kumar Rohit, Chiranjeev Kumar and Ginny all of the Indian Institute of Technology and Naik was recently published in IEEE Access, an open access journal of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.

In the decade or so that I’ve been doing this blog, I have never seen a reaction like I have in regards to this story or this story on my wife’s now failed attempt to get her Oakley eyeglasses by Oakley or Lens Crafters, both of which are owned by Luxottica. I say failed, because if you recall from the latter story, my wife used a online page to try and get help based on the instructions in this Tweet:

Well, they didn’t intervene. They simply closed the case and sent an email to my wife telling her so. I guess that means that they don’t care about fixing her issue with a pair of glasses that is under warranty.

But back to the reaction that my stories on this topic are getting. Thirty one emails from frustrated customers of the above companies hit my inbox over the last few days (and as an aside, I’m still trying to work my way through these emails so If I haven’t responded to you, I apologize and I will get to you ASAP). That’s a big sign that these companies have a serious customer service issue. So are Tweets like these from people who illustrate that the experience that my wife and I have had isn’t a unique one. Starting with Oakley:

And for Lens Crafters:

And finally Luxottica:

Elements of all of the above mesh with what my wife and I have experienced. Which is a customer service experience that is so bad, there are major teclos and cable companies that look good because of how bad these three companies are. When you do worse than a telco or cable company, you’re really in trouble. And you should take action immediately to fix that. But in the case of Oakley, Lens Crafters, and Luxottica, I do not see that happening. Thus you should avoid anything owned by Luxottica, which according to this article on Wikipedia is quite a bit because if you run into trouble, you won’t get help. Ever. Just browse Twitter and see for yourself.