Businesses and employees have a love/hate relationship with email. It is the main pipeline of business communication, a huge profit center for marketing departments, and acts as a digital filing cabinet both personally and professionally for millions of internet users. Some would consider it a consuming nemesis - never-ending and following them everywhere they go.

It's undeniable that cloud computing and outsourcing have resulted in better margins and higher profits for businesses over the past 10 years. However, data breaches have continued to plague companies around the globe with no end in immediate sight. This begs the obvious question: Could there be some relation between the two?

Passwords do not receive the respect they deserve as a first line of defense against threats. Roughly 60 percent of confirmed data breaches involve weak, stolen, or default passwords. Most businesses provide little to no training for employees around selecting secure passwords, so it's no surprise that "123456", "password", "qwerty", and "Star Wars" are commonly used.

The Threat That Tech Can’t Stop

Your phone rings at work. The caller says he is from your IT helpdesk, and they need some information from you to wrap up a project that affects you. He asks for some information, and it seems legitimate enough, so you give it to him. Believe it or not, you’ve just fallen victim to a type of cybercrime called social engineering, also known as the “low-tech hack.”

They were surprised, and you likely be will, too.

Of the hundreds of healthcare organizations I’ve helped document HIPAA and meet compliance requirements, most are unaware that their Patient Health Information (PHI) is exposed in some way.

We hate to break it to you, but there's a HIPAA requirement you’re more than likely doing wrong. The Department of Health & Human Services’ Office for Civil Rights (OCR) is cracking down on requiring a true Healthcare Security Risk Analysis.