Data Security

There is a lot of talk these days about fake news. Fake news is intentional misinformation. Falsehoods. I recall getting an email from a friend during the 2008 presidential election. The information presented was shocking, but appeared to be from a “reliable” news source. I spent 15 minutes on Google and found that the information was completely false...

When Edward Snowden leaked the biggest collection of classified National Security Agency documents in history, he wasn’t just revealing the inner workings of a global surveil­lance machine. He was also scrambling to evade it. To com­municate with the journalists who would publish his secrets, he had to route all his messages over the anonymity soft­ware Tor,…

The sudden exposure of the Clinton campaign email cache is perhaps the ultimate evidence that we’ve all overcommitted to email—we’ve put too much in it, expected too much from it, and now, finally, we’re seeing the spectacular signs of its impending destruction. Email is simply not up to the rigors of modern political and business…

For nonprofit organizations, finding high-quality, low-cost IT resources can be a challenge. You may not have the budget, or the in-house with a deep enough background in technology to know what the best decisions are. This is especially true when it comes to data protection. Your donors are your greatest asset, and the last thing they want is to have to worry about whether or not you are preventing their personal information from being stolen...

Leaked Democratic Party email exposed a simple fact: People gossip. But in today’s cybersecurity environment, leaders would do well to recognize that a bigger crowd can listen. At this point, you may be so tired of hearing about email that you’ve decided to stop using it—instead, you've thought about using smoke signals, telegraphs, semaphore flags,…

Regardless of size or resources, nonprofits must keep cybersecurity top of mind. The assumption may be that a relatively small public image and a lack of disposable assets would make nonprofits less appealing to hackers than most corporations. However, every business and organization is a potential target, according to Ann Puckett, information technology manager for…

Strong passwords are a critical first line of defense against would-be data thieves: One bad password from one staffer in your organization is all it takes to open the door to hackers. Yet, by and large, we're still pretty bad at the whole thing. Just take a look at this list of the 25 most popular passwords of 2015, from security-services firm SplashData. Brace yourselves...

The U.S. Supreme Court will consider this week whether to hear a potentially landmark First Amendment case on donations to nonprofit groups, marking a flashpoint in a battle over money and free speech increasingly taking place in courts instead of legislatures. At issue is a California regulation requiring all nonprofit groups that solicit donors in…

Timothy Sedlak, a private investigator in Florida, was charged Monday with trying to gain unauthorized access to a charity's computer system allegedly while doing research on whether some nonprofits are “unintentionally” providing financial support to Islamic jihadists. The charity wasn't identified in a complaint filed against the 42-year-old Sedlak in federal court in the Southern…

On July 27, in the wake of the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) data breach, The Daily Signal ran a story titled "How Obama’s Poor Judgment Led to the Chinese Hack of OPM." The Daily Signal, as it happens, is the multimedia news arm of The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank based in Washington, D.C. And earlier this week, The Heritage Foundation was hacked...