Cyber Security News and Information from Commonwealth Sentinel

Last winter, a nonprofit food pantry director in a town of about 6,000 people called me after what could have been a very bad week. Someone had impersonated her board chair in an email and asked the bookkeeper to transfer $4,200 to a new account. The bookkeeper, who works two jobs and answers emails between […]

A few years ago, I sat across from a senior statewide school administrator, a man whose decisions shaped policy for K-12 schools across the Commonwealth, and explained, plainly, that schools are targets for cyber criminals. He would not have it. Schools, he told me, had nothing a criminal would want. No money to speak of, […]

Incident response (IR): iAn organization’s structured approach to detecting, managing, and recovering from cybersecurity threats and data breaches aims to limit attack damage, minimize business disruption, and prevent future incidents. The owner of a family-run building supply company in a Kentucky town of about nine thousand got to the store a little before seven. She […]

What is a virtual vCISO is, and why it may be the smartest line item a small organization adds this year A few months ago, I sat across the table in the break room from the owner of a family-run manufacturing shop in central Kentucky. He had forty employees, a payroll system, a customer database, […]

MFA prompt bombing is a growing threat, but multifactor authentication remains one of your best defenses. Here is what changed and what to do about it. In September 2022, a contractor working for Uber got a notification on his phone. Then another. Then another. Forty push notifications in thirty minutes, each one asking him to […]

Why do you need to worry about IoT security? Your office is full of computers you never think about, and that’s a problem. Yes, IoT security is a real thing. Last month, a county clerk in central Kentucky called our office with a problem. Her building’s HVAC system had been acting up for weeks, cycling […]