Employers should migrate to a hybrid environment only after building a solid foundation to support remote workers. As Covid-19 pandemic restrictions have eased, employers are adjusting their work-from-home policies. Some companies, including Airbnb, have doubled down and made substantial commitments to remote working. Others, like Google, have begun to shift to more in-person and hybrid office policies. This range just among the two tech giants is an example of the different possibilities being considered by other employers. According to a 2017 Gallup poll, 43% of U.S. employees worked remotely all or some of the time.

Part of the reason for this difference has to do with how all of us have adjusted to working in the face of the pandemic. I explain more in this post for Avast’s blog.

Today is World Password Day. Ideally, every day you should take some time to improve your password collection, and the best way to do that is to use MFA. But for all of its utility, MFA still has its resistors. If you need some ammunition to fight for its acceptance across your company, we’ll bust a few MFA myths in my latest post for Avast and hopefully help you convince folks to get onboard.

New laws passed in Utah and Virginia provide consumers with the right to access and delete some of their personal data and opt out of data collection under certain circumstances. In this blog post for Avast, I examine the differences among the various states that have enacted data privacy laws.

The Payment Card Industry Data Security Standards (PCI DSS) organization has made a series of updates to its standards with its latest version 4.0. It contains several important improvements, perhaps the most important change is the expansion of encryption and MFA requirements to protect all accounts that have access to cardholder data. I describe these developments in my post for Avast’s blog here.

Malware group FIN7 is once again on the move, leveraging software supply chains, remote program execution methods, and stolen credentials to deliver ransomware to enterprise networks. The group goes by several different names and is adept at using various backdoor tools to worm their way into corporate networks. You can see the various malware programs that have been attributed to FIN7 over the past two years in the diagram below from Mandiant.

You can read more about their exploits in my latest blog for Avast here.