IT Insights Blog — security

We here at the TestOut Continuing Education news desk and blog factory consider ourselves to be relatively plugged in when it comes to both the IT industry and the wider world beyond that. We try to write about current events and real-world challenges. It's probably more interesting for you to read about those things, and it keeps us both on our toes and with one ear to the ground.

Everyone, at one point, has had a moment of frustration in which they said more or less the same thing Princess Leia does during the scene in the trash compactor in Star Wars. Han Solo has just finished bawling her out, and Leia snaps, "Could be worse." What happens next is the first indication of the trash monster, followed by Han glumly stating the obvious: "It's worse."

It's the end of National Cyber Security Awareness Month as we know it. Do you feel fine? Once every year, there are four weeks set aside on the calendar for those of us in IT — and, really, for all people everywhere — to focus on the importance of both improving our knowledge of information security best practices, and improving our actual implementation of said best practices. Your passwords, for example, aren't going to change themselves.

In the modern business world, many people communicate via text, or by using any of a variety of different chat apps. It's often more convenient than a phone call, and usually quicker (if inevitably sloppier) than sending an e-mail. It's likely to be a long time, however, before e-mail entirely disappears as a means of communication and sharing information. And as long as e-mail continues to exist, if not precisely flourish, it will remain a potentially dangerous point of entry to your workstation and, more problematically, your employer's network.

Sometime this weekend — just before midnight on Saturday, to be precise, quite literally at the eleventh hour — the next potentially winning combination in the Powerball lottery will be announced. The current jackpot stands at roughly $435 million, with a "cash value" (whatever that means) of $273.1 million. Maybe that's the after-tax payout? Maybe it doesn't really matter to the winner? What's a quarter of a billion dollars between sweaty-palmed suckers hoping to turn a multi-tens-of-dollars investment into a multimillion-dollar American Dream?