Spear phishing is a form of cyber attack targeted at a particular person or small set of individuals. In these scams, bad actors research their chosen targets and attempt to convince them to surrender sensitive data or financial information. Spear phishing attacks may also aim to infect user devices with malware, allowing attackers to steal the…

Data theft is the act of stealing information stored on corporate databases, devices, and servers. This form of corporate theft is a significant risk for businesses of all sizes and can originate both inside and outside an organisation. The term data theft can give the impression that this kind of breach is based on malicious intent, but this is…

Provisioning is the process of making information technology (IT) systems available to users. Depending on your organisation’s needs, provisioning can be defined at the network, server, application, and user level: Network provisioning involves setting up a network that can be accessed by users, servers, and devices. The telecommunications…

Okta is the identity company that stands for trust. We consider the security and privacy of our customers’ data as foundational elements of our business. Today, we’re updating our customers about their transfers of EU individuals’ personal data to Okta’s service, in the light of the 16 July 2020 judgment of the Court of Justice of the European…

Biometric authentication is a security process that compares a person’s characteristics to a stored set of biometric data in order to grant access to buildings, applications, systems, and more. With cybercrime, fraud, and identity theft on the rise, it’s more important than ever for businesses to help customers and employees verify their identity,…

A password manager is an application that stores and manages online credentials—think of it as a type of vault that keeps passwords safe. In addition, password managers make it easier to access apps and websites since they can automatically input login details. Everyone who uses a computer or smartphone is likely familiar with switching between…

As the great Mark Twain once wrote in response to reading his own obituary in May of 1897, “reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.” Fast forward nearly a hundred years to 1995, and a Finnish computer scientist named Tatu Ylönen created a secure transport protocol known simply as Secure Shell (SSH). What do these things have to do with…

Privileged access management (PAM) is a way of authorising, managing, and monitoring account access with a high degree of administrative permissions. This is done to protect an organisation’s most critical systems and resources. These “super user” accounts are isolated within an encrypted repository or vault. The access of these systems is…

Data misuse is the use of information in ways it wasn’t intended for. User agreements, corporate policies, data privacy laws, and industry regulations all set conditions for how data can be collected and used. Data misuse violates these requirements. Unlike data theft, data misuse doesn’t necessarily happen as a result of a cyberattack or when…

A one-time password or passcode (OTP) is a string of characters or numbers that authenticates a user for a single login attempt or transaction. One-time passwords are created by an algorithm, that generates a unique value for each OTP by factoring in contextual information, like time-based data or previous login events. Tech support teams…