Living Social, the popular online discount site, recently experienced a
cyber-attack affecting more than 50 million of their customers. Users with a
Living Social account received an email explaining the data breach, which
included hackers accessing customer user names, email addresses, birth dates
and passwords.
In the email to customers, Living Social asked many users to change their
password immediately. While the passwords were encrypted, Living Social Chief
Executive Tim O'Shaughnessy wrote "We also encourage you, for your own
personal data security, to consider changing password(s) on any other sites
on which you use the same or similar password(s)."
Unfortunately, the other compromised personally identifiable information
(PII) - user names, emails addresses and birth dates - was not encrypted,
putting the personal data of millions of Living Social customers ... (more)
The convenience, efficiency and cost benefits cloud computing offers
organizations has made moving healthcare data and records to the cloud make
sense for hospitals, physicians and other healthcare providers. Security and
data breaches are a concern for any industry utilizing the cloud, but
healthcare unfortunately seems to be particularly vulnerable to attacks. The
Washington Post recently reported that The Department of Homeland Security is
fearful that the health industry is "inviting" an attack with its out-of-date
policies and lack of oversight.
A recent WIRED article discu... (more)
By Gerry Grealish
PerspecSys Vice President of Marketing & Products
Last month Gartner Analyst Jay Heiser conducted an extremely informative and
thought-provoking webinar entitled "The Current and Future State of Cloud
Security, Risk and Privacy." During the presentation, Mr. Heiser highlighted
what he called the "Public Cloud Risk Gap," characterized in part by
inadequate processes and technologies by the cloud service providers and in
part by a lack of diligence and planning by enterprises using public cloud
applications. In many ways, it was a call to arms to ensure that adequa... (more)
By Gerry Grealish
PerspecSys Vice President of Marketing & Products
Earlier this week, the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary and Massachusetts
Ear and Eye, Inc. (MEEI) agreed to pay a hefty $1.5 million settlement to the
U.S. Department of Health & Human Services for alleged HIPAA violations.
According to MEEI, a personal laptop that contained unencrypted electronic
protected health information (ePHI) was stolen, exposing a large amount of
personal, clinical, and patient prescription data.
The government's investigation found that MEEI failed to take steps necessary
to comply w... (more)
By Gerry Grealish
PerspecSys Vice President of Marketing & Products
Gartner recently published a report that highlights the growing importance of
Cloud Access Security Brokers - solution providers that offer unified cloud
computing security platforms. This solution category includes a new class of
products that Gartner terms Cloud Encryption Gateways, which encrypt or
tokenize sensitive information before it leaves an organization's firewall.
These solutions, if designed properly, allow organizations to maintain
control of sensitive data since they replace the original "clear-text... (more)
Gerry Grealish is Vice President, Marketing & Products, at PerspecSys. He is responsible for defining and executing PerspecSys’ marketing vision and driving revenue growth through strategic market expansion and new product development. Previously, he ran Product Marketing for the TNS Payments Division, helping create the marketing and product strategy for its cloud-based payment gateway and tokenization/encryption security solutions. He has held senior marketing and leadership roles for venture-backed startups as well as F500 companies, and his industry experience includes enterprise analytical software, payment processing and security services, and marketing and credit risk decisioning platforms.
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Tom Flynn
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