Articles by Jack M. Germain

That old adage about crime never pays could not be more false, at least when it comes to modern-day cybercriminals. For those bad actors using ransomware as their weapon, crime is paying more than ever Cybersecurity company Emisoft estimates that the true global cost of ransomware, including business interruption and ransom payments in 2020, was a...

The Linux operating system is many things to many users. It is not a one-size-must-fit-all computing platform like Microsoft and Apple provide A prime example of Linux's wide range of functionalities is easily found in Garuda Linux. Not typically available in mainstream distributions, its large assortment of desktop offerings will challenge your co...

IT experts at the hacked Colonial Pipeline did a good job in mitigating the May 7 cyberattack and successfully stopped it when discovered by shutting down the network. But the attack was mostly invisible in the weeks-long initial stages, according to a briefing NTT Security executives conducted Tuesday "It's very difficult to say what they could ha...

New research by a threat detection and response firm shows that the most common threats to corporate networks remain consistent throughout all companies -- no matter their size Vectra AI on Wednesday released its 2021 Q2 Spotlight Report, "Vision and Visibility: Top 10 Threat Detections for Microsoft Azure AD and Office 365." These top threat detec...

Mobile phishing exposure doubled among financial services and insurance organizations between 2019 and 2020. Cyberattackers are deliberately targeting phones, tablets, and Chromebooks to increase their odds of finding a vulnerable entry point A single successful phishing or mobile ransomware attack can give attackers access to proprietary market re...

Efforts by several internet industry groups are focusing on new measures to fix inherent security weaknesses with the rapidly expanded use of internet of things (IoT) devices for enterprises and consumers Supply chain security company Finite State on April 27 announced a partnership with application security solutions Veracode to offer comprehensiv...

If you are looking to expand your sales territory and have not yet put Latin America on your bill of lading, you're missing a golden opportunity. Latin America offers the fastest-growing regional e-commerce marketplace in the world You do not think so? Well, think again. Last year, the total retail e-commerce sales to the LATAM region grew 36.7 per...

After one year of avoiding physical stores due to the pandemic, consumers have had time to adjust to the likes and dislikes of digital stores. But if vendors hope to keep customers visiting their online wares, they had better tune in more sharply to the new wave of shoppers' attitudes toward online customer service practices Customer service platfo...

Picking the ideal Linux distribution takes research and planning. Not because Linux is a challenge. Rather, the Linux OS offers a seemingly unending selection of distributions to meet general computing as well as special needs for enterprise, SMBs, and personal use However, for enterprise and business-focused users, one popular choice has fallen in...

Kaspersky on April 26 released survey results revealing that almost one quarter (22 percent) of PCs still run the end-of-life OS Microsoft Windows 7, which stopped receiving mainstream support in January 2020. When operating systems reach end of life, vulnerabilities will remain on the system without patch updates to resolve issues, providing cybe...

Red Hat on Wednesday concluded its April two-day Summit 2021 Virtual Experience with a hefty list of announcements and presentations by the company's innovative customers driving the latest open-source technologies and trends Perhaps one of the event's most significant announcements was Red Hat's plan to deliver the first functionally safe, continu...

A surge in online shopping sprung up over the past year due to the pandemic. The rapid adoption pushed the expected timeline for consumers to expand their online shopping forays. It also opened the door to a drone delivery industry to feed a growing demand for increased online deliveries Companies scrambling to compete with the advancing delivery c...

TrovaPage, a new global open internet marketplace, helps creators and other entrepreneurs focus on marketing without detracting from their creativity Cofounder Jingming Li on Tuesday announced the marketplace's launch, though the website has been open for the last few months for entrepreneurs working in the creator industry.

Customer churn is costing mid-market companies an average of $5.5 million per year. Retailers need to avoid the costly mistakes that result in such disastrous churn, according to a recent CRM and Sales Impact Report from SugarCRM. This presents a clamorous alarm to marketers.

Some 400 million patients worldwide are affected by more than 7,000 rare diseases; yet treatments for rare genetic diseases remain an underserved area. More than 95 percent of rare diseases do not have an approved treatment, and new treatments are estimated to cost more than $1 billion Sanath Ramesh created the RareCamp project and the OpenTreatmen...

From coin shortages and curbside operations to contactless transactions, how consumers pay for their purchases has been completely transformed during the pandemic. Marketers expect that transformation to continue and expand The digital payments industry continues to mature at an accelerated pace. Shoppers will see new options with more features thi...

When I last visited the ever-changing Netrunner distribution, I said that Netrunner Linux still went its own way. That was its twentieth rebirthday upgrade over its then 10-year history in late February 2020 The same is true for Netrunner 21.01 XOXO -- now with more modern trappings. Today, the two-month-old Netrunner XOXO release is something much...

A recent study of eBay ads found that digital brand search ad effectiveness is overestimated by up to 4,100 percent. A similar analysis of Facebook ads yielded a number of 4,000 percent If those high figures make you wonder if your company is wasting far too much of its advertising dollars on targeting the wrong audience, Dr. Jorge Barraza, a profe...

The larger the Internet superhighway of information grows; the more users get run over by privacy abuses and stolen data. If only we could rebuild the Internet's infrastructure to make data's journey safer and more secure is a common cry of IT and cybersecurity experts Some efforts are underway to mitigate the privacy and data theft issues. But des...

The ominous looming deadline for filing 2020 federal income tax returns has been extended from April 15 to Monday, May 17, 2021. If your paperwork is still in the "pulling it all together phase," our conversation with a tax expert might provide you with a few tips to save money, especially if you are an entrepreneur working in research and develop...