Incident detection and response is the process of finding attackers in your IT infrastructure, monitoring or determining their activity, containing the threat and removing attackers or any viruses from your systems. When the European Union enacted the General Data Protection Regulation, which protects the personal data of EU citizens regardless of the geographical location of the organization using the data, companies all over the globe had to ensure they were prepared for cyber-attacks. If companies were not compliant with the GDPR, then they could not do business with any citizens or businesses based in the EU. To be compliant, data must be protected. Therefore, being able to immediately and effectively respond to incidents or threats of a data breach became of utmost importance.

Ransomware is exactly what it sounds like! It is a type of malicious software that, once installed, blocks access to a computer system until a sum of money is paid. All businesses and individuals are at risk to a ransomware invasion. It can be introduced into your systems simply through clicking on a link or opening an encrypted file. And once introduced, the malware has access to all of your data. Therefore, protecting against ransomware is necessary. Here’s where to start.

Picture this: you head into your office on Monday morning, turn on your computer and begin to reply to emails. You see an email from your internet provider, alerting you that someone has accessed your company data from a foreign country over the weekend. None of your employees have been overseas in the last month, and you realize that the unthinkable has happened: your business has been hacked and your customer’s information has been stolen.

As the facts of the latest major data breach were revealed—this time, affecting some 500 million customers at the Marriott International-owned Starwood hotel chain—cyber security experts contemplated how the rupture could have been avoided.

The holidays are not only the time for giving and receiving; for hackers and cyber criminals, it’s also the perfect time for taking.

For security professionals, it can be difficult to go to the decision-makers in a company and demand that a certain amount of money is spent on penetration testing. Rather, there must be justification for the expense, and the expenditure needs to ultimately contribute to the company’s profitability. If the decision-makers don’t understand the impact pen testing can have, they will never agree to the expense.

However, ROI from services like these is not always clear.

In order to justify the need for penetration testing, security professionals must qualify and quantify the “what” and the “why” of the service. This article will explore the potential returns an organization can expect from a penetration test.