We all know about good hygiene practices for ourselves and our homes, but what about practicing good cybersecurity hygiene? What does the word hygiene mean when applied to a digital context?

When we think of hygiene for cybersecurity it’s the essential items needed to practice the bare minimum in cyber threat prevention, we’re strong advocates for advanced cybersecurity threat prevention and believe you can never be too protected – however these 8 items will in many cases prevent the vast majority of outside threats.

Computers and laptops are a significant investment, especially for business owners who need to supply staff with devices to work on (hardware costs typically represents a significant portion of many business owners technology budgets). You may be wondering how long that investment will last?

Computers degrade in performance over time due to both hardware aging and software advancements that demand more resources.

Microsoft is no stranger to acquiring programs only to later shut them down (though they pale in comparison to Google’s own graveyard of acquisitions) and now Skype will be the latest casualty with a shutdown date of May 5th, 2025 being officially set.

AI or Artificial Intelligence is becoming more and more common place in our daily lives, including in our places of work. You may even be using it daily without realizing it, most search engines for example have an AI response to queries baked in at the top of the page and if that’s the farthest you look then all of your searches are currently being powered by AI.

Other tools like weather apps, navigation and even the spam filter in your inbox is using AI to train and collect data that is then given back to you as answers to your questions or provide solutions you are looking for.

If you’re a Microsoft 365 subscriber - or considering it to utilize tools like Word, Excel, PowerPoint and more in your business – you may not be taking advantage of all of the features it has to offer.

These features include ways to help organize your files and corral your workload under one umbrella, which is useful with the deluge of information many of us are processing each day in the course of performing our job duties.

The race for domination continues to heat up at China’s AI model “DeepSeek” enters the fray, just days after newly inaugurated President Trump announced his plans to invest 500 billion in AI infrastructure during the course of his term.

Established as a startup under the same umbrella as the quantitive hedge fund High-Flyer, which is primarily owned by AI enthusiast Liang WenFeng (who built his fortune during the 2007-2008 financial crisis), little has been verified about how DeepSeek came to be.

As of January 24th very little has come out about the hack on the nationwide cloud-based software solution provider, PowerSchool, which provides tools to school districts in the form of staff management, attendance taking, enrollment, grade information and more.

In what is truly the 11th hour (inauguration day for President Trump is January 20th, 3 days from now at the time of writing), the Biden administration announced an executive order that looks to strengthen US cyber defenses against outside influence, particularly from Russia and China.

New year, new threats? Hackers have not slowed down their efforts year over year, in 2024 the average cost of a data breach rose to 9.36 million US dollars. Of course this is taking into account the massive breaches that occurred last year with one attack costing the company that was targeted $500 million dollars.

Windows operating system end of life events are a big deal, with 1.6 billion active Windows devices as of 2024 Microsoft still holds a commanding lead over any other operating system provider. Even though Windows 11 was released almost 4 years ago at this point, it still only represents 28% of the global Windows market share (with 70% still using Windows 10).

There are a lot of reasons for this, from users being comfortable with the Windows 10 interface to many devices that simply aren’t Windows 11 ready (interested in a Windows 11 device in 2025? Here’s our guide).

Users hanging onto a previous version of Windows until the bitter end is nothing new for Microsoft, Windows 7 still had a 12% market share when Windows 11 was released October 2021 (almost 2 years since it’s own EOL date occurred).

In the past, Microsoft has released critical security updates even for systems no longer receiving support.