California’s privacy laws have now been in effect for more than two years, and we are beginning to see the consequences. Earlier this month, the California Attorney General’s office released the situations where various businesses were cited and in some cases fined for violations. It is an interesting report, notable for both its depth and breadth of cases.

The CalAG is casting a wide net and in my blog for Avast I discuss what happened there and how the  privacy legal situation is evolving elsewhere. I also offer some words of advice to keep your business from getting caught up in any potential legal action.

A new report by John Sakellariadis for the Atlantic Council takes a deeper dive into the rise of ransomware over the past decade and is worth reading by managers looking to understand this marketplace. In my latest blog for Avast, I explore the reasons for ransomware’s rise over the past decade — such as more targeted attacks, inept crypto management, and failed federal policies — as well as measures necessary to start investing in a more secure future.

We recently learned about major security breaches at two tech companies, Twilio and Slack. The manner in which these two organizations responded is instructive, and since both of them published statements explaining what happened, it’s interesting to observe the differences in their communication, along with some lessons learned for your own breach planning and response. You can read more about the situations in my latest blog post for Avast.

I first met Dave Piscitello in the late 1990s when we served together on the Interop+Networld conference program committee, and collaborated on several consulting reports. He went on to create his own conference on internet security that ran from 1997-2000, then went on to work on security for ICANN until 2018. He serves on several international do-gooder infosec boards and is part of a consultancy called the Cybercrime Information Center that produces some very excellent reports on the state of malware, phishing, and domain name abuses. The most current report is on phishing, which shows that monthly attacks have doubled since May 2020. What makes his report powerful is that includes data from four commercial information sources, which collected more than a million unique attacks and publish their own blocklists. I wrote about his work and the state of phishing for my latest Avast blog here.

Last summer, I wrote about a major international investigation of the NSO Group and its Pegasus spyware. We described how it works and what you can do to protect your phone. NSO has gone through some difficult times as a result of that analysis. NSO was almost purchased by an American company that is closely linked to intelligence operations until the US Government put them, along with another Israeli spyware vendor Candiru, on a special block list that prevents both from obtaining government contracts. Candiru, you might recall, was discovered to be doing its own zero-day spying by Avast researchers.

In my post today for Avast’s blog, I review what transpired at a recent hearing held by the House Intelligence Committee. There were three witnesses who emphasized the threat of spyware to various democracies around the world, and provided lots of specifics about how Pegasus has operated.

The initial phases of a breach are often the most critical: The intruder is counting on your confusion, your lack of a plan or a clear chain of authority, and any early missteps. Given that it’s only a matter of time before a breach happens, what can you do after encountering an incident to minimize the damage?

For businesses of all sizes, incident response planning infrastructures have gotten very complex, with many interconnected relationships that might not be immediately obvious — until something goes wrong. In this blog for Avast, I outline how you can prepare for an incident in a well-thought-out and organized manner.