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Microsoft cemented its place in businesses with their productivity software suite Office in the 1990’s, combining many existing tools such as Word and Excel and PowerPoint under one umbrella and making it clear that Microsoft was not just it’s operating system Windows but a source for businesses looking to consolidate their work under one platform and expand their tech capabilities as computers became more ubiquitous in modern workspaces.

Now that it’s 2024 we’re reflecting on the biggest events in tech that occurred in 2024, and in today’s article we want to talk about the biggest cyber security breaches that occurred in 2023.

Before we get into it, let’s talk about the hard numbers.

Happy New Year! It may not feel like 2024 yet to you (it certainly doesn’t to us) but the new year is upon us and with that comes a renewed opportunity to address some of the tech items that have been pushed under the rug to deal with “later”.

Whether you’re committed to trying to up your game this year or clean up areas of your business where the tech has fallen behind, we have 7 New Year’s resolutions that will push your business forward and maximize your efficiency and growth in 2024.

New Year, New Tech? Starting off, the start of the year is a great time to do some housekeeping and figure out what devices may be holding you and your staff back.

Whether you’re “tech aware” or not, most of us know that the human element is one of the riskiest elements of our business when it comes to our data being compromised.

2023 proved that in spades with many of the largest attacks of the year being orchestrated with “low tech” methods – whether that be social engineering as we saw with MGM or literally low tech as with the attack on Rockstar that was conducted with a cellphone, TV and an Amazon Firestick.

The holidays are truly upon us and for many of us that means traveling to friends and family and enjoying some time spent away from work and in our loved one’s company.

However, for business owners being on the go doesn’t mean the work stops and we often carry our work devices with us to keep a watchful eye on things even from afar.

The cyber attacks we typically report on are localized or contained to a specific sector or even business entity.

In Netflix’s new movie “Leave the World Behind” characters are confronted with what looked like a global cyber attack causing mass destruction and chaos, including self-driving cars crashing into each other with no driver present and planes crashing into the ocean into land with GPS absent.

We’re all familiar with the usual suspects when it comes to cyber threats, viruses, trojan horses, phishing attacks, malware and ransomware. We’ve covered these threats in great detail (here’s just a few articles on these topics: 10 scary cybersecurity statistics business owners need to know,  Zero trust or zero effort, how does your businesses security stack measure up?, Can you spot the phishing clues? And 10 tips to avoid falling for a phishing scam). Even if you’re not a technical inclined person you probably have some awareness of how to avoid these threats, such as being careful with suspicious emails and attachments or not downloading files from unknown sources.

We’ve written quite a bit about cyber security disasters and disaster recovery in that context (here are just a couple options Why every business needs a documented backup and disaster recovery strategy and Data Breached? 5 ways to reduce the impact on your business), but what about a disaster that’s truly out of your hands?

Depending on where you live there are different types of types of disasters to worry about, and some disasters such as solar flares or geomagnetic storms are a global concern.

If you’re traveling the holidays this year, we have eight tech tips to help you stay safe while using your devices on the go.

We’ve offered holiday themed tech advice before (here are a couple of our past articles on the top 10 Holiday Shopping Tips for Safer Online Shopping & 5 Holiday Tips for Your E-Commerce Business and 5 for Everyone Else). The holidays usually mean more time off which can lead to more time spent browsing the web or being able to work on things in your business you usually don’t have time for.

Intel just released a fix for a vulnerability that would make certain CPUs in jeopardy of being compromised. The vulnerability would allow an attacker to gain privileged access to machines or trigger a denial-of-service attack.

You can see the list of affected CPUs here, patching for this vulnerability may need to occur in phases including micro-updates to the BIOs, system OS and drivers.