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Pepper Hamilton Client Alerts on Cybersecurity

2014 Verizon Report Offers Advice for Combatting Nine Common Threats to Cybersecurity

Sharon R. Klein | kleins@pepperlaw.com
Jeffrey L. Vagle | vaglej@pepperlaw.com

The 2014 Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR) was released on April 22, providing the deep empirical analysis of cybersecurity incidents we’ve come to expect from this annual report. The primary messages of this year’s DBIR are the targeting of Web applications, continued weaknesses in payment systems, and nine categories of attack patterns that cover almost all recorded incidents. Further, despite the attention paid to last year’s enormous data breach at Target, this year’s data shows that attacks against point-of-sale (POS) systems are actually decreasing somewhat. Perhaps most importantly, the underlying thread that is found throughout this year’s DBIR is the need for increased education and application of digital hygiene.

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Ignoring XP End of Life May Make Your Company an Attractive Target

Sharon R. Klein | kleins@pepperlaw.com
Jeffrey L. Vagle | vaglej@pepperlaw.com

On April 8, Microsoft officially ended all support and ceased providing updates for their Windows XP operating system. This “end of life” (EOL) announcement is not uncommon with software platforms, where continued support of aging software (XP is more than a dozen years old) becomes too expensive or too impractical, and the user is thus encouraged to upgrade to a newer version of that software. This all makes sense on the surface. As we’ve seen time and time again, software–especially large, complex pieces of software like operating systems–tends not to age well. Due to the sheer complexity of systems like XP, retrofitting patches to fix errors and vulnerabilities can be quite difficult, and may even lead to unintended consequences (i.e., more bugs). Thus, over time, software companies may urge their customers to migrate to the (relatively) clean slate provided by upgraded versions of their software.

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