October has been dedicated to Cybersecurity Awareness Month every year since 2004. However, as this year’s Cybersecurity Awareness Month comes to an end, your Data Evolution experts are here to remind you that cybersecurity matters every day.

Your network infrastructure takes time and effort to strategize and develop. Any compromise to your network or infrastructure can disrupt connectivity, communication, and other operational activities. Network infrastructure security is crucial to your productivity.

Your passwords are like the lock to your house. You would not offer the keys to random people or install a simple lock that any criminal could pick easily. Any compromise to your password security could potentially hurt your credit, financial health, identity, and more.

Network devices such as laptops, tablets, or servers make it easier than ever for organizations to collaborate and accomplish work together. However, these devices, also called endpoints, also provide many potential entry points for threats such as viruses, unauthorized access, and other malicious activity.

These days, social engineering attacks are one of the top threats to your company’s cybersecurity. A recent study found that, on average, organizations get targeted by more than 700 social engineering attacks per year. This type of threat includes techniques such as phishing and ransomware, and it relies on a lack of awareness, attention, and time to assess the threat.

If you read or watch the news, then it is no surprise that companies’ electronic systems get compromised all the time, whether big or small. The biotech and life science industry is no stranger to these threats. Even with antivirus and antimalware systems in place, breaches are still possible through the vulnerable path of your employees.

Life science companies regularly deal with intellectual property and expensive lab equipment, making them an appealing target for cybercriminals. This is a major issue on two crucial fronts:

A data breach has the potential to cause reputation damage, financial ramifications, and legal liability. Any company with sensitive data or intellectual property must ensure their work is secure. Data security is an escalating issue for life sciences companies in particular: 40% of cyberattacks on life sciences companies reported to the media since 2017 took place in 2020 alone.

With the recent news that Bill Burr, who originally wrote the guidelines for government employees password polices that influenced the business world too, now regrets those complexity standards he developed businesses are now left to decide how they should handle these new standards.

NIST released a draft of its guidelines for review last year, and this summer, released the final version. It’s a four-volume document, written, as Fortune describes, “in turgid bureaucrat-speak.” We’ll save you the trouble of wading through it and highlight some of the biggest changes from the password best practices of the past.

Apple likes to cultivate a pristine image: hardware, software, and user experiences blending seamlessly together. And for the most part, image and reality are the same.

Apple products command a premium because they “just work.” Businesses owners will tell you they choose Macs — despite their higher price tags — because they’re powerful with less hassle. And the perception is that they’re more secure.

In fact, since Apple debuted Mac OS X (10.0) in 2001, the conventional wisdom has been that the operating system is nearly impenetrable to viruses and other malware due to it being built on Unix.