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Tag: technology

Cybersecurity budgets fail to keep pace with intensifying threat landscape

Written by STEP Software on . Posted in Blog, StringN. No Comments on Cybersecurity budgets fail to keep pace with intensifying threat landscape

INFRASTRUCTURE INCREASINGLY UNDER THREAT The Suncor attack reflects the accelerating vulnerability of organizations in the infrastructure space – see Colonial Pipeline and JBS Foods for earlier examples of high-profile ransomware events that resulted in widespread consumer impact. It also comes on the heels of a warning from the Canadian Centre for Cyber Security (CCCS) that the oil and gas sector is increasingly being targeted by opportunistic cybercriminals. Barely two months ago, the Globe & Mail newspaper reported on pro-Russian claims that...

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Twitter source code gets leaked online. Here’s why it matters.

Written by STEP Software on . Posted in Blog, StringN. No Comments on Twitter source code gets leaked online. Here’s why it matters.

THE SECRET SAUCE, NO LONGER SECRET The New York Times reported on March 26th that Twitter had sent a copyright infringement notice to GitHub. The company asked the developer forum to remove a repository containing what it said was leaked source code. GitHub removed the code the same day, and while it was not immediately known when the leak first occurred, the Times reported the code had been exposed for a number of months. The optics are troubling. Any leak of source code is worrisome for any company. For a software or platform company, however, it’s infinitely worse. Source code...

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Ongoing Twitter outages speak volumes about infrastructure’s importance

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A GATHERING STORM Whether it’s an API error, or simply a notification that you’ve exceeded your allowed number of followed accounts, it falls well short of a complete outage or a network-wide meltdown. To the typical end-user presented with these errors, Twitter is still largely operational, but it seems to be experiencing a series of annoying glitches here and there. Over time, the annoyance factor adds up. None of this is enough to trigger a mass response from the platform’s 300 million users. Yet. But it is enough to highlight an unwelcome increase in the reports of intermittent outages...

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Creative Disruption – why we should embrace change, not fear it

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NO LONGER JUST NICE TO HAVE All this uncertainty puts the usual year-end technology trend predictions in a somewhat darker context. And all of this got me thinking about the why of disruption. See, every year, we read the trend reports – this year’s crop was chock full of predictions involving artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, BYOD, low code/no code development, quantum computing, and others – and then we set them aside and go back to work. Sure, all of those hot trends sure sound incredibly cool – and make no mistake, nerds like us were all talking about them when we got together...

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The Customer Communication Connection

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CARING ENOUGH TO KNOW If you didn’t know your child’s favourite sport or remember your mother’s birthday, what would that say about your commitment to the relationship? Really, not as much as you might think. You might be preoccupied or mistaken. But you know that, to your child or your mother, it might seem like you aren’t paying attention. As business people, we have very good intentions to bolster the evidence that shows our customers that we are paying attention. If we care enough to remember details about their business, their purchase history, past requests,...

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Focused IT Consulting Fosters Small Business Innovation

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THE SYSADMIN: WEARER OF MANY HATS A system administrator handles the core of your IT setup. They’re the ones who design and maintain how users, groups of users, computers, and groups of computers behave. This is true whether you’re looking at a specific user or computer, or across the entire network. Adding IT consultants to your company’s roster of reliable resources can ensure your network is optimized and secure.  In many small- to mid-sized businesses, the IT expert is expected to know everything about technology, even if it’s not necessarily computer tech,...

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