Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

I recently had a minor task involving changing an option - on one of our command line tools - from taking a required argument, to taking an optional argument. This should be easy they said; just change the respective option struct to take an optional argument, add a colon to the optstring, and get on with your life. Well, it proved to be easier said than done. My initial expectation was that a solution similar to the one below should just work. And it does work, just not in the way I expected.

Open Source Robotics Challenges is a series of blogs that will share guidelines and advice for open source companies to overcome market barriers. We will touch on topics regularly raised by companies in our open source community such as security awareness, prototyping strategies, safety architecture, adoption and more.

Cybercriminals do not discriminate against the organization, people or industry they target. These actors look to exploit vulnerabilities in resources to intercept valuable data from small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs). Cyberattacks are inevitable, and organizations must have the right controls and information security systems to mitigate the impact of an attack.

Humans are the weakest link in the cybersecurity chain. Where have you heard that before? Humans can be hacked! That too? Yes, I am also one of those weak links in the constant battle against malicious cyber criminals and it can be attributed to just being lazy. It’s human nature and we can easily be socially engineered into giving up our precious online user credentials to the bad guys.

In an age when attackers create over a million phishing sites each month, and phishing serves as a beachhead for 95 percent of all attacks against enterprise networks, how can businesses respond? Part of the answer lies in educating users to recognize and report phishing, of course. But user education only goes so far – particularly because the same statistics cited above show that, on average, only 3 percent of users will report phishing emails.

For the newest instalment in our series of interviews asking leading technology specialists about their achievements in their field, we’ve welcomed Mark Kerzner, software developer and thought leader in cybersecurity training who is also the VP at training solutions company, Elephant Scale. His company has taught tens of thousands of students at dozens of leading companies. Elephant Scale started by publishing a book called ‘Hadoop Illuminated‘.

The N-able Head Security Nerd, Lewis Pope, just published a blog outlining the top 25 cybersecurity bad practices demonstrated by MSPs today. To accompany his post, I wanted to add one more risky bad habit to his list. It’s something I commonly see being practiced by too many MSPs from a business perspective—allowing a customer’s budget to dictate what a cybersecurity offering should look like.