Before joining CDW, I served as the director of curriculum and innovation for a large school district in Texas. In that role, I witnessed the creativity and dedication of teachers firsthand. I often traveled with those educators to conferences where we learned together about exciting new technologies that could transform the classroom experience. When we arrived back at work on Monday, we were often disappointed to learn that the networking or security teams wouldn’t allow us to use our new favorite tool in the classroom due to privacy issues.

Back then, I had a hard time understanding the rationale behind those decisions. I felt like the “Department of No” was simply getting in the way of the real work of the district. Today, that experience helps me understand both sides of the equation as I work with CDW clients to develop their security programs.

I know that teachers are only trying to do what is best for their students, but they often don’t understand that they might be putting children in jeopardy if they’re not using safe, vetted applications in the classroom. That’s why I helped develop the K-12 Blueprint for Security toolkit, to better educate administrators, teachers, students and parents about privacy and security risks.

As organizations across the country have moved to remote work models, many have reported an increase in cyberattacks. Cybercriminals, it seems, are taking advantage of the public health crisis to exploit security vulnerabilities in home-based computer systems. What can organizations do to minimize the chances that their shift to remote work results in an expensive breach? We recommend a multipronged approach that combines the use of security tools and end-user education.

As cybersecurity professionals, we work each day to protect against a wide variety of threats. Attackers probe our firewalls with port scans, search out application security flaws and wage other exotic attacks against our systems. While those threats are real, the controls we use to address them don’t touch the No. 1 threat that affects organizations on a daily basis: phishing.

Phishing attacks are nothing new. They’ve certainly increased in sophistication over the past 20 years, but attackers have consistently used them to gain access to systems and information over the years for one good reason: They too often work. Let’s look at three security controls that organizations can put in place today to reduce their risk of falling victim to a phishing attack.

The decennial U.S. census is about to begin. The work of the census provides crucial information for government agencies, academic researchers and private businesses, but it also opens the door for cybercriminals seeking to exploit the widespread publicity around the census to conduct malicious attacks. We will inevitably witness social engineering attacks from individuals pretending to be associated with the census asking for Social Security numbers, passwords and other sensitive personally identifiable information.

Organizations need to prepare themselves for these inevitable attacks and ensure that their employees don’t fall for scams that accidentally compromise sensitive information.

It’s no secret that email is one of the most common ways that attackers gain a foothold on an organization’s network. Targeted spear-phishing campaigns use carefully designed messages that combine a sophisticated look and feel with appealing content to trick users into clicking on malicious messages. Awareness campaigns have their place, but the practical reality…

I recently spent time speaking with IT leaders at CDW’s Protect SummIT in Philadelphia and heard a common theme: Organizations across the U.S. are incredibly concerned about the threat posed by social engineering attacks. All too often, leaders I speak with tell me that their organizations had recently fallen victim to phishing attacks that requested…