Quick Intelligence Blog

The Calgary Herald has reported that the Calgary Police Service, along with the RCMP, have helped arrest members of international cyber crime family Sodinokibi. Police agency Europol says that the Sodinokibi family was responsible for 7,000 internet infections worldwide, 600 of them in Canada.

A survey by data management company, Cohesity, found that 40% of American consumers don’t want businesses to pay ransomware demands to cyber criminals. The study elicited responses from more than 1,000 U.S. consumers ages 18 and older. Moreover, 23% of those surveyed said they'd stop doing business with a company that paid a ransom. Further 48% would consider not doing business with a company that paid a ransom.

Anyone who has ever taken a goal setting workshop is familiar with the phrase “not having a plan is planning to fail.” When it comes to cyber security, if you don’t have a cyber security protection and response plan, you are certain to face a cyber security failure of some sort.

Nowadays, the digital equivalent of the wild west is called the Dark Web. The dark web is a subset of the internet that is intentionally hidden and not indexed. To access the Dark Web, a specific browser, like Tor, is required. Unavailable to the casual internet user, the Dark Web houses a treasure trove of stolen information, offering it for sale and trade on chat groups and online forums.

Privacy and security go hand in hand. Cyber security focuses on protecting the information from unauthorized access, while privacy focuses more on protecting the contents of the information and ensuring it isn’t accessed or shared inappropriately. Both businesses and individuals have an expectation of privacy when they trust another business with their data.

A new survey by the Canadian Internet Registration Authority (CIRA) says that nearly 70 per cent of Canadian organizations facing a ransomware attack last year paid the demands to avoid downtime, reputational damage and other costs. The interesting thing is that when they asked cyber security professionals if they supported legislation to make ransomware payments illegal, 64% said yes.

Whether you run a small business or a large business, you know that a ransomware attack can be devastating. Did you know that these 3 common misconceptions could give you a false sense of cyber security? Listed below are 3 of these misconceptions and what you can do to address them, and in turn, be more cyber secure.

Canada’s data privacy law, the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act, or PIPEDA, governs how private Canadian companies are responsible for the collection, use and disclosure of personally identifiable information (PII) during the course of their regular business activities. PIPEDA fist came into law in 2000 and must be reviewed by parliament every 5 years. The last update to PIPEDA came into law on November 1, 2018, and for the first time, it included regulations for disclosing a cyber security breach.