Shaun Treacy, the President of MHR (Millennium Hotels and Resorts) North America, has recently sent a communication to guests who stayed at some of the company's locations between March and June of 2016. In his letter, he warns that an unnamed form of malware was discovered on some of the company's Point of Sale systems, and that they should be on their guard and monitor their credit card statements for signs of suspicious activity.

An interesting and disturbing new form of Ransomware was on display at this year's Def Con convention, in Las Vegas. So far as anyone knows, this is the first, proof of concept ransomware that targets smart thermostats. Yes, you read that correctly. The new ransomware is specifically designed to target smart thermostats.

Much has been written in previous months about the explosion in growth of the (IOT) Internet of Things, and the security risks posed by that growth. Where PCs, laptops, and smartphones all have fairly robust security measures in place to prevent hackers from gaining easy access, the same cannot be said of the growing legion of internet-connected objects ranging from smart lightbulbs and thermostats to smart door locks.

In some important ways, the media has a tendency to distort the reality where hacking and data breaches are concerned. The stories that tend to make the headlines are the external breaches that see hackers making off with tens of millions, or even hundreds of millions of customer records.

Although a number of tech companies have been working hard to create new and ever more robust security and authentication protocols, a recent survey revealed that the American public in general remains highly skeptical of the new procedures, and only a tiny fraction of the population actually employs them.

You probably don’t know the name Benson Leung. He’s one of the internet’s unsung heroes, and in recent months, he’s been quietly waging a one-man war against manufacturers producing faulty USB-C chargers. Many users have reported having their smartphones fried by the faulty cables, which did not properly regulate the amount of current flowing through them.

There has been an explosive growth in companies offering private cloud as part of a broader offering of managed services, and businesses are responding positively to the trend.

Interestingly, while companies are moving to embrace the private cloud and managed services in general, overwhelmingly, the push to do so is being led by CIOs. This data, from a recent industry survey, found that 67% of companies that have moved to the cloud, or are planning to do so in the next 12 months, are doing so at the urging of the CIO. The same survey found that just 6% of CEOs, 4% of CFOs, 3% of company Boards of Directors were the driving force behind migration to the cloud.

Sage, LLC, a British company providing business software solutions for clients around the world, was the latest victim of a data breach. This one, however, came from inside the company itself. This is an increasingly common problem, though not as widely reported as the high profile data breaches from hackers outside the company’s firewall.

What do you do when you get a popup window generated by some piece of software you use, informing you of a critical update? Do you stop what you’re doing right then and perform the needed update? Most people don’t, according to recent research. In fact, a full ninety percent of users simply close the window and carry on doing whatever it was they were doing.

You’ve probably seen the headlines. This year, hardly a week goes by that there isn’t a report of a company in some way connected to the health care industry falling victim to ransomware. If you think it feels like they’re being specifically targeted, you’re not imagining things.