It would be an understatement to say that 2020 was a year of transformation. Many trends that were already well underway were accelerated by the pandemic and the shift to Work From Home. Sadly, cybercriminals follow the opportunities and look for the low hanging fruit when it comes to finding their next victims, and were savvy enough to quickly shift their attacks on personal vulnerabilities to this new Work From Home paradigm.

This is very significant to the average person, as most people who are victims of a cyberattack usually find themselves on the wrong end of credential theft or ransomware, and both of these types of incidents often start with Phishing and Social Engineering. So let’s go over a few areas where Phishing and Social Engineering have evolved in 2021.

Choosing a Managed IT Services Provider (MSP) to support your organization’s technology operations is a serious decision. In the managed services model, the service provider partners with a business to help strategize, support, and manage their IT operations on an ongoing and long-term basis.

Picking an MSP can be a difficult and confusing process, so in this blog you will get answers to some common questions about working with DP Solutions, and MSP’s in general.

2020 is almost over, which is probably a relief for many of you. To say it’s been a unique year is an understatement. But as we try to move forward with optimism for 2021, we have to start thinking about what might be changing and how we need to adjust our plans. So let’s go over a few emerging trends that could be meaningful to you or your colleagues in 2021 and beyond, and how they may impact your life.

Just before Thanksgiving this year, as students were entrenched in virtual learning, a major ransomware attack took down Baltimore County Public School’s (BCPS) computer systems. As a result, schools closed for several days, many devices were unusable, and like any other major IT security incident, significant costs were incurred to remediate the damage. BCPS will most likely undergo an assessment to determine exactly how the incident happened and they will have to invest significantly to harden their systems and change how they operate.

Shortly after the BCPS attack, a few miles up the road, Greater Baltimore Medical Center (GBMC) experienced its own ransomware attack, which took down many of their systems. Fortunately, patient care was still mostly maintained, aside from some postponed elective care. It appears that data and operations will be back to normal in fairly short order, but there will still be costs associated with this, and certainly nobody at GBMC wants to be associated with a ransomware incident.

As we continue to see attacks on this scale and frequency it’s important to not just shake our heads at another incident and wonder what needs to change in order to stop seeing these headlines. Instead, let’s uncover what we can learn from these incidents to minimize our own risks, both personally and in our businesses.

It is fascinating to look back over the last decade or so to see how cellular networks have evolved. As smartphones like the iPhone and Android became the norm as opposed to a luxury consumer technology good, demand for fast and stable wireless Internet connections grew exponentially. Now we expect to be able to watch a YouTube video on demand with minimal buffering time no matter where we are. When cellular carriers moved to 4G networks several years ago, this became the standard.

But the rise of 5G networks create the potential for new ways of working as well as benefits to the daily lives of many people that they probably haven’t considered yet. We often think about devices bringing us faster and more powerful technology, but the rise of 5G really represents a new option of services that could be available to us regardless of our devices. I’d like to look at a few ways that 5G networks will change the way we work and live with technology over the next several years.

Technology success is one of the key drivers for achieving business goals in 2020. As recent events have proven, organizations that were ready to leverage technology to work anytime or anywhere with maximum flexibility found they were well-equipped to deal with the challenges of the new normal as the world shifted beneath their feet. The opposite is true as well. Businesses that found themselves behind on their technology struggled to adapt and faced real consequences such as lost productivity, dissatisfied customers or operational failure.

About a year ago, we started hearing about new requirements for organizations doing business with the United States Federal Government, particularly with the Department of Defense (DoD). In the interest of protecting sensitive information, the government began developing and introducing the Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification, or CMMC. While there are many similarities for the goals and framework of CMMC as compared to other standards such as HIPAA/HITECH and PCI, the CMMC adjusted standards in a way that are meaningful and important to discuss.

I want to outline some key pieces of information you should know about CMMC so that you can meet and maintain strong cybersecurity controls that satisfy the powers that be.

We talk a lot about how our work lives have changed, in some ways permanently, by the pandemic. Most of us who typically would spend a lot of time in offices, or visiting clients, or participating in networking meetings and conferences have learned to adapt to doing these tasks in a virtual way as best we can. Working from home, while perhaps expanded these days, is nothing new.

But with schools back in session, we are now asking kids, who don’t have the experience and flexibility of the typical office employee, to learn in a completely unprecedented way. Part-time in person, part-time virtual, socially distanced education is not something we have done as a society before.

Between Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Tik Tok, Instagram, and whatever other Social Media platforms that are on the horizon, our lives are more public than ever before. There are definitely upsides and downsides to this landscape, but I’m not here to talk about that today. Whether we like it or not, it’s clear that Social Media is here to stay.

What I do want to talk about is what we should be thinking about as we engage with these platforms.