In April, Direct iT President and CEO David Javaheri flew out to a cybersecurity conference to present on the same stage as business luminaries Daymond John, Robert Herjavec, and Kevin O’Leary.

Javaheri believes that small businesses are being targeted by threat actors more frequently than ever before.

This piece was first published in Direct iT President and CEO David Javaheri's newsletter, the Good, The Bad, and the Ugly.

On May 1st, I spoke to over 100 attorneys at the 2023 Real Estate Bar Association Spring Conference in a joint presentation with FBI Special Agent Vivian Barrios.

According to NCC Group, an international cyber and software resilience business, March 2023 broke the record for the number of ransomware attacks, with 459 attacks measured. This is a 62% jump from numbers reported in March 2022. Even more concerning is that this is a 91% increase from February 2023.

The Common Vulnerability Exploit CVV-2023-0669 was the main culprit for the skyrocketing number of attacks.

The American Bar Association suffered a data breach affecting 1.5 million lawyers who use their website, according to Reuters. On Thursday, April 20, the ABA posted on their website and in an e-mail to members that the breach exposed usernames and passwords that had been used to log in to the site they had used prior to 2018, as well as their current Career Center site.

In Early March, the Biden Administration released their "National Cybersecurity Strategy," a roadmap for "a safe and secure digital ecosystem for all Americans," which "reimagines cyberspace as a tool to achieve our goals in a way that reflects our values: economic security and prosperity; respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms; trust in our democracy and democratic institutions; and an equitable and diverse society.

An ongoing phishing campaign has been arriving in victims' inboxes posing as Internal Revenue Service (IRS) containing Microsoft OneNote files that are supposedly W-9 tax forms. Once opened, a hidden script allows for malware known as Emotet to self-install itself on your system and spread.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation on March 24 sent out a special bulletin warning companies of criminals spoofing US-based companies who make large vendor purchases. This type of attack, Business Email Compromise (BEC), happens when you or someone within your organization received an e-mail that is spoofing either your company, or a company that you often deal with.

Nantucket Public Schools fell victim to a ransomware attack at the end of January, which forced the early dismissal and subsequent cancellation of the next school day at their four public schools.

"Earlier this morning, we discovered that Nantucket Public Schools computer systems were compromised by Ransomware," wrote Superintendent Elizabeth Hallett in a statement to the community.

A new data study published by Network Assured ranks Massachusetts as the 10th worst state for data breaches in 2022.

The study takes every breach from last year, and "compare the number of data breaches to each state's number of registered businesses, to obtain a value for 'breaches per entity,'" according to a post on the organization's website.

ChatGPT, a "chatbot" developed by OpenAI, uses language models to "interact in a conversational way."

Last month, Microsoft announced a multi-billion dollar investment deal with OpenAI, while rumors circulated that they are getting close to being able to demo applications of the language model within Microsoft Word, Powerpoint, and Outlook, according to the Verge.