As we discussed last week, financial scams may be on the rise in 2022. Social engineering is a pretty common tactic utilized by scammers when it comes to siphoning funds from unwitting victims, but there are some tools you can use to combat it.

Recently a company called V7 Labs has released an extension for Chrome that’s able to detect artificially generated profile pictures, such as those created by Thispersondoesnotexist.

As we’re nearing a month into the conflict between Russia and the Ukraine, cyber warfare between the two countries is reaching an all time peak. We covered the topic of Ukraine’s “IT Army” recently in this blog, and we mentioned growing concerns we’ve seen from users that there may be a spill over effect when it comes to cyber threats.

At Valley Techlogic we believe educating our community on internet safety and providing concrete goals for businesses in our area to help improve their cybersecurity measures whether or not they're covered by a Valley Techlogic plan is a valuable resource our company can provide to make us all a little safer online.

We’ve all been exposed to the ongoing crisis occurring in the Ukraine as Russian forces have made their way into the country and are heavily attacking major Ukrainian cities as they attempt to gain control of the capital city of Kyiv, causing nearly a million Ukrainian citizens to seek shelter in neighboring countries as of the time of writing.

Whether your employees are still mostly remote, or you’ve moved into a hybrid setup, many employers are looking to return to business as usual as COVID numbers drop and speculation increases that we’re moving into the endemic phase of this illness.

We covered this topic much earlier in the pandemic, and we still agree with the advice we gave for prepping employee devices before bringing them back into the company network.

You may have thought we finished our series on the Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification (CMMC) program, but we would be remiss if we didn’t cover the consequences and penalties for not complying with the program if you’re a current Department of Defense (DoD) contractor.

Google began requiring 2-factor authentication on some user accounts this past year, and while there’s always some inconvenience involved in making that switch the benefits definitely outweigh it.

Google enrolled 150 million members in the last three months of 2021 in their 2-factor authentication program, and they’ve found that instances of accounts being hacked dropped by half for those users.

This is our fifth article on this topic and as we bring it to a close, I’d like to first look back at what we’ve covered so far.

We started the series looking at what’s ahead for the Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification (CMMC) program in 2022. Then we covered tiers one, two and three as they exist in the current 1.0 model of the program.

Last month we released our new cyber insurance report which is an in depth look into this topic, but we wanted to touch on what we’re specifically seeing so far in 2022 in today’s article because from what we’re seeing in from our clients and in the industry – cyber insurance requirements are on the rise.

We’ve covered tier one and tier two of the Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification (CMMC) program, and this week we’ll be tackling tier three.

Before we dive in, we want to mention that we’re covering tier three as it exists currently (in 2022), version 1.0 has five tiers but once version 2.0 of the program releases it will be reduced to three tiers.