Cyber crooks are becoming more and more sophisticated in their attempts to victimize people and steal their sensitive information. Here are five tips that may help you stay one step ahead of cyber crooks. Tip #1: Protect against spear phishing by looking for incorrect or unusual URLs. Spear phishing is when cyber crooks send targeted emails to you hoping you will share personal financial information or passwords. Emails can look very sophisticated and may even address you by name or … [Read more...]
Anthem Data Breach
Anthem is the latest company to fall victim to a data breach. The data breach affected over 80 million of Anthem customers, and is considered a massive data breach for the second largest health insurer in America. One of the biggest concerns for the Anthem customers affected is one not immediately obvious – tax fraud. The Department of Revenue Commissioner for the state of Connecticut is urging residents there to file their tax returns as soon as possible to avoid being victims of tax return … [Read more...]
President’s Data Security Plan
One of the issues President Obama plans to cover during his State of the Union Address today is cybersecurity – and it may be one of the few issues that both Republicans and Democrats will agree on. The discussion regarding the data security plan seems to concentrate on breach notification. The intention is to make sure consumers are notified in a timely fashion whenever their personally identifiable information was involved in a breach. At this time, most legislation regarding breach … [Read more...]
What’s PII? Personally Identifiable Information
HIPPA, PII, FCC, OCR…LMNOP! How can anyone keep track of all the acronyms floating around today? It's not enough to know what an acronym stands for, either – if business owners don’t understand how they apply to their business, they could find themselves in hot water PDQ! Let’s start with PII. PII stands for “personally identifiable information”. Organizations are under an obligation to protect the confidentiality of the information they have about people, including … [Read more...]