What do Home Depot, Target, Jimmy John’s, Wendy’s, Scottrade, Gmail, and the National Security Agency have in common? Each has suffered a high-profile data breach related to third-party access in the past five years. It’s clear: Many organizations, across industries, are failing to put the necessary security measures in place to prevent or minimize the identity and access risks associated with third-party access.

What is one of the biggest challenges facing K-12 schools today? It might surprise you, but the answer is “cybersecurity.” K-12 schools are a prime target for cyber attacks.

While they might not seem like the most obvious victims of a hack, K-12 schools are attractive for cyber criminals because they hold an enormous amount of student data—an increasingly attractive target for cyberthieves. Read on to learn more about the appeal of student information and why it’s at greater risk than ever for a data breach.

Recently, we’ve been discussing what you must consider when choosing between a single identity and access management (IAM) vendor platform versus multi-vendor point products. In this final installation, we’ll take a closer look at best-of-breed and security as two final considerations and wrap it all up. 

Businesses today are increasingly reliant on third parties, such as contractors, contingent workers, and vendors. And while these third parties enable organizations to decrease operational costs and increase productivity and agility, it also means greater numbers of external users need remote access to internal networks and sensitive corporate resources and data.

Ransomware, which encrypts data on a victim’s machine and then demands payment of a ransom (usually in bitcoins) to decrypt the data, is running rampant in cyberspace. In fact, ransomware attacks increased more than 600 percent last year compared to 2015. Here’s another frightening statistic: There is a ransomware attack on a company every 40 seconds.

Bring-your-own-device (BYOD) policies are now a necessity for universities and colleges across the country. In Part 1 of this series, we covered the positives and negatives of BYOD, as well as the security implications of such policies. In this post, we’ll go over how to easily implement secure BYOD using a modern identity and access management (IAM) platform.

Bring your own device, or BYOD, is a fast-growing trend on higher-education campuses across the country. In fact, at least 42 percent of U.S. colleges and universities have implemented a BYOD strategy. Meanwhile, bandwidth on campuses has nearly tripled since 2012, with more than 70 percent of schools offering at least 1 GB, in part because of the need to keep up with BYOD demand.

Gone are the days of your employees working a standard nine to five from within company walls. Today, employees often work remotely—from different devices and at all hours of the day.

When your company parts ways with employees, are you able to immediately terminate all access to corporate data? If not, you’re opening the organization up to a very real danger.

If you’re active with any online service, then you have probably gone through the process of SMS two-step verification, in which a company or app texts a one-time code to your phone as a way to verify you are who you say you are in order to access the service or reset a password. But have you ever stopped to consider how secure this method truly is?