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Last week, we introduced over 20 new threat models to help defend your data against insider threats, ransomware attacks and threats to your most sensitive data.

Experts had Laremy Tunsil flagged as one of the top prospects in Thursday night’s NFL draft. But shortly before the opening pick, something disturbing happened. An incriminating video tweeted from Tunsil’s own verified Twitter account showed the Ole Miss star smoking a “marijuana-like substance” from a gas mask.

DatAlert Analytics just got some new threat models. Our research laboratory is tracking new ransomware, finding vulnerabilities in common security practices, and setting up new threat models to keep your data safe from insider threats.

Hackers are able to break into systems and move around easily without being detected. How is this possible with so much invested in firewalls, malware scanners, and other intrusion detection software? Answer: often times, no one has really taken the IT system out for a security test drive.

Humans like to click on links. Some of us are better at resisting the urge, some worse. In any case, you’d also expect that people in the higher reaches of an organization — upper-level executives and the C-suite — would be very good at resisting phish bait.

Table of Contents Ransomware strains that have been targeting hospitals Should your hospital pay? Reasons not to pay Would a ransomware infection be considered a breach, according to HIPAA? Are there other potential HIPAA violations? Overview Healthcare providers have always been attractive targets for data breaches. Why? The value of a health record is high. According to Reuters, health records are 10 to 20 times more valuable than credit card numbers. Rather than stealing health records and trying to sell them on the black market, cybercriminals are using ransomware to turn a much quicker profit.

This article is part of the series "Malware Coding Lessons for IT People". Check out the rest: Part I: Learning to Write Custom FUD (Fully Undetected) Malware Part II: Fun With FUD Ransomware!

One metric that’s difficult to gauge when it comes to cybercrimes is the economic impact felt by companies.

As of late, the weekly press coverage of ransomware has been building a kind of brand recognition that’s the envy of many legitimate IT vendors. Ransomware’s own success has made it difficult to differentiate between the quickly evolving product variants — differences with how you get infected, what’s encrypted, ransom amount and special new features.

Setting up network file sharing is one of those core IT practices that every Windows admin knows about and has implemented as part of their daily work. The basic mechanics of this have not dramatically changed since Windows Server 2003 and are relatively straightforward. However, after configuring the resource shares and the individual NTFS permissions for each folder, admins sometimes lose sight of the big picture as they handle daily permission requests on an ad-hoc basis.

Repeat after me: frameworks are not standards. They are instead often used as a guide to navigate through the underlying standards.

Cybercriminals who previously targeted Windows operating systems with ransomware have expanded their customer base to include the Mac OS. Known as KeRanger, it’s the first ransomware variant detected that infects Mac users.