Jeff Gorman
President
Everyone has items in their personal life of great value. The intrinsic value is not based on what these things could be sold for, the value is because the items are of personal significance and can not be replaced. The same is true for your business; you have critical data and systems which are vital to the day-to-day operation of the organization, and they have immense value to your ability to stay in business, regardless of whether the data would have value to anyone else. This is the exact dynamic that is exploited in ransomware attacks. Cyber-attackers exploit some aspect of your business to gain access, they encrypt your data or systems to make them unusable, and because those systems have great value to you – regardless of whether the data has value to anyone else – they trust you will pay a large ransom to get back your access to keep your business functioning.
The largest waves of cyberattacks now are not targeted at specific companies; they come from widespread attempts to get unprepared organizations to make a fatal flaw in action to a seemingly benign request, they exploit that action, they do things like remove your ability to access data and systems which are valuable to you and your business, and they hold those systems ransom in an attempt to get you to pay to have your access reinstated. In general, the only market demand needed by the attacker to achieve financial success is to trust that you value your data enough to need to have access to the data for your business to run. It does not matter the size of revenue your company generates; it does not matter whether you are a global operation or a local business; they are typically not looking to sell what they have illegally accessed. The simple fact you now need what they have exclusive access to creates exactly the situation they need to create a market where they can profit.
This scenario may seem alarmist, but we continue to see a growing number of local businesses of a variety of sizes dealing with significant impact from ransomware scenarios exactly as described. Organizations that are not investing in a structured approach to information security practices are at a very high risk of failing to protect what is most valuable to their business. The investments should come in a framework of layers; there is no single tool or ‘easy’ button to adequately prepare an organization against the multitude of ways attacks can infiltrate a company in today’s hyper-connected world.
Organizations that are not investing in a structured approach to information security practices are at a very high risk of failing to protect what is most valuable to their business.
If you are not investing time and money in the areas of end-user cybersecurity education to better position employees to be able to detect malicious messages, you are doing the equivalent of asking a child unfamiliar with ‘stranger danger’ to keep people from getting into your house to see your valuable items. If you are not deploying security platforms which actively screen incoming mail messages, links, and attachments to create an entry barrier for malicious messages, and software which detects irregular behavior and malicious files on workstations and servers, you are doing the equivalent of not caring about dangerous visitors to your house and behaviors in your neighborhood which could indicate a risk to your home. If you are not consistently patching software to ensure identified security bugs are remediated in a timely manner and you are not doing regular vulnerability assessments to understand what potential attackers could exploit in an attempt to get access to your data, you are doing the equivalent of disregarding warnings from law enforcement about knowing your windows are unlocked and knowing thieves have been seen around your house trying to get access to your things of value.
To keep the comparison going, following an Information Security framework and implementing common practices for your organization is like having visible signs outside your house with a security fence, an alarm system, exterior cameras, and a neighborhood watch. None of those things assure you will not fall victim to losing things of value, but the presence of barriers creates more resistance than a random attacker might find worth his time. In information security terms, the email campaign the cyber attacker launches to try to get people to click on malicious links is only of value to the attacker if it gets delivered to the user, gets clicked by the user, gets executed on the computer of the user, and is able to spread. If your security framework breaks that chain of events, you are going in the right direction to protect your data.
Keller Schroeder has years of experience making positive impacts on our clients with respect to all aspects of Information Technology, including Information Security. If there is any aspect of protecting your environment where you would value some professional input discussing your current posture and common practices from our certified team, please reach out to us. We would welcome the chance to help you protect what you value most.
In the meantime, we engage regularly in Healthcare IT conversations with the practitioners in our network. I thought it would be helpful to share what is on the minds of those Healthcare IT leaders. I’ll touch on several topics that are important in our region (if not globally) right now. Because many of these topics run deep, I am making this a multi-part series – based on our decades of IT consulting for healthcare providers in Indiana, Illinois, and Kentucky, and on conversations, I have been part of in the Greater Nashville Area over the past three years.
Kris Linville
Cisco Intersight supports the OpenAPI specification and fully-functional Python and PowerShell SDKs. It also offers a user-customizable dashboard to focus on the information, faults, and tasks that are relevant to them. The user can then leverage the cross-launch virtual KVM and tunneling capabilities for UCS Manager, UCS Director, CIMC, and HyperFlex Connect for easy access to dive deeper into the individual systems.
Sometimes the special items feature ingredients from local suppliers as their unique thread. Sometimes the special items are themed around the time of year or a different ethnicity than the normal fare of the restaurant. This ‘one day only’ trait makes the restaurant different for me; I always order from the ‘specials’ menu, and I’ve always enjoyed it. The restaurant uses the specials menu to be even better at who they are – 
Craig Schulte 
Let’s start with a short introduction and description. Google first created Angular in 2010, followed by Facebook with React in 2013, showing both have the backing of major industry players. Both are popular web platforms written in JavaScript, which primarily run in your browser. Much of the code that traditionally ran on a server has migrated to your browser, and Angular and React have helped to push this trend forward. A common goal shared by both is to decouple an application’s logic from its user interface (UI), and both strongly focus on dynamic page updates (aka AJAX) – meaning your entire browser window does not reload when updates are made, only the content that changes needs to reload. This generally leads to a much nicer experience for the user.
Angular is typically classified as a full framework while React is considered a library. This means that Angular includes everything plus the kitchen sink, but React only concerns itself with the user interface. React is more lightweight than Angular, but includes less functionality out of the box.
Since Angular is a full framework, it naturally has a longer, steeper learning curve. Angular also requires the use of TypeScript (a statically typed version of JavaScript), which is an additional skill that must be learned. On the upside, Angular includes a tool for almost every scenario, so there’s usually a standardized, well-defined path forward.