On March 22, Urology Austin became the second medical company to suffer from a major breach. It was a particularly nasty one, combining data theft with a ransomware attack that impacted more than a quarter million users.

To its credit, the company took immediate, decisive action.

Today’s corporate networks look so different from the networks of yesteryear that they’re almost not even comparable any more.

In olden times, when the personal computer was a relatively new invention and networks were just beginning to form, they were homogenous and tightly controlled.

Tavis Ormandy is either the first, or the last person on the planet you ever want to get an email from, depending on your point of view. As Google’s best, most prolific bug-hunter, he’s constantly on the prowl for security flaws that could be exploited by hackers that could put your data at risk.

Just how bad it bot activity on the net? How much traffic is generated by bots, and how big of a problem is that for business owners? The answers will surprise and dismay you.

According to the annual “Bad Bot Report” published by a company called Distil, Bot activity accounted for 40% of all traffic on the internet in 2016, increasing by 7% from the 2015 figures.

Just a friendly reminder: if you still have a system running Windows Vista, time is running out to upgrade. Windows has announced the official EOL (End of Life) date for the OS as April 11, 2017. As of that date, there will be no more software updates, period.

Do you think your business is safe from a ransomware attack? It isn’t.

This was indeed the case that when ransomware first burst onto the scene. Hackers were targeting very large institutions, seeming to favor the health care and insurance industries.

Ask.com is one of the internet’s oldest properties. It is not as well-known as the titans of the web (Google, Yahoo, etc.) but almost everyone who has spent any time at all on the internet is familiar with the brand, and its popular browser-based toolbar, distributed by the APN (Ask Partner Network) is used by millions.

Nobody likes CAPTCHAs. They’re annoying. They slow you down when you’re trying to log into a site that has data you need. Unfortunately, CAPTCHAs themselves proved necessary to help weed out bots and keep them at bay.

They come in a variety of shapes and sizes, but in Google’s case, they began using text digitized during the course of the company’s massive Book Indexing project.

If you’re a business owner, and you haven’t yet heard of BEC scams, it’s a term you owe it to yourself to get familiar with. The acronym stands for Business Email Compromise, otherwise known as CEO fraud, and it’s growing in popularity.

The basic idea is that a hacker spends time studying your business, how it operates and who you do business with.

The security company Checkpoint recently found a critical security flaw in both the Whatsapp and Telegram services that could have spelled big trouble for their users.

Fortunately, it has already been patched with no apparent damage done, but below, the details of the flaw are outlined because this may not be the last time we see a threat like it.