It’s hard for modern extraordinary gadgets so surprise the society, but some of them are really amazing. Technological developments, which are provided below, can be not only eccentric but very useful in certain situations. Such units are able to reveal a geek in you, so they are worth checking out.
Modern drones are sturdy, compact, and technology-enabled, that is why many experts regard them as the start of a new golden era of drones. Its corps usually has sensors and cameras, which allow the device’s owner to control it and avoid a colliding with obstacles. Unmanned aircraft supports the special 10-bit color profile with a wide dynamic range that gives more options for color correction on video filming. During FHD video shooting, a 4-time lossless zoom helps get closer to the objects that are far away and capture previously inaccessible shots from a safe distance. If you’re interested and want to read reviews on specific models for a certain budget, check out https://www.hotrate.com/electronics/drones/
Speakers for Vinyl
Many modern artists still release their albums on vinyl, so the music lovers can amass a great collection of records and enjoy the pure sound. The best speakers for vinyl are able to fill the room/house with music, rid the listener of interference, and present the maximum detail of the music track. Active and passive models can really create surround sound and reveal those elements (some instruments background, particular music technologies, etc.), which couldn’t be heard while listening to the standard MP3 or FLAC files.
Fitness Trackers
This mobile device is widely used in sport and everyday life because it fixes the traveled distance, counts burned calories, as well as determines heart rate. It tracks sleep phases thanks to the smart alarm function. The peculiarity of this gadget is that the smart bracelet wakes its owner up exactly at the time when it is easier for him\her to wake up (the approximate time frame to wake up may be set up). Some models count swam distance. The bracelet can scan products and count calories, as well as remind him/her of the need for making physical exercises.
Smart Speakers
The gadget completes tasks via voice commands and built-in monitor displays media files. Such speakers are a great addition to the Smart Home system. They are able to demonstrate notifications, play videos from the Internet, and show lyrics. Some devices give an opportunity to make voice calls outside the house and analyze clothes (via front-facing camera) by offering various outfits.
Single-Board Computers
This microcomputer is a network-attached storage, web server, or media center. The device fits in the palm of the hand and looks stylish. It can work with such operating systems, as Linux, Android, and even Windows 10, but the last one has stripped-down server version without a graphical interface but still worth a try. The unit supports video (up to 1080p) playback. After the distribution kit installation, it can display photos and play audio.
Programmers are someone who plays with codes and creates a new world.
Today almost every job is computerized — many programs and websites are available to ease of our works. Thanks to some greatest programmers who help to revolutionize the modern world.
Yes, thanks to veteran programmers — because of them and their contributions, computers and smartphones become alive to help and entertain us.
In this article, we are going to list some greatest programmers who laid down the foundation of IT world and became an integral part.
Ada Lovelace — often regarded as the first computer programmer — was an English mathematician and writer, chiefly known for her work on Charles Babbage’s early mechanical general-purpose computer, the Analytical Engine. Her notes on the engine include what is recognized as the first algorithm intended to be carried out by a machine.
2. Dennis Ritchie :
Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie was an American computer scientist. He created the C programming language. And he is also one of the co-creator of the Unix operating system.
C is one of the most used programming languages in the modern world. It is used in the development of various software applications, embedded system development operating systems, and has influenced most modern programming languages.
Ritchie also received the Turing Award from the ACM in 1983, the Hamming Medal from the IEEE in 1990 and the National Medal of Technology from President Bill Clinton in 1999. Ritchie was the head of Lucent Technologies System Software Research Department when he retired in 2007. He passed away on October 12, 2011, causing the Fedora 16 Linux distribution to be released in his memory.
3. Linus Torvalds :
Linus Torvalds — the creator and, for a long time, principal developer, of the Linux kernel. He also created the distributed revision control system Git and the diving logging and planning software Subsurface.
Linux kernel became the kernel for operating systems such as the Linux operating system, Android, and Chrome OS.
Linus was honored with the 2012 Millennium Technology Prize by the Technology Academy Finland because of his creation of a new open source operating system for computers leading to the wide spread use of Linux kernel. He is also the recipient of the 2014 IEEE Computer Society Computer Pioneer Award.
4. Ken Thompson :
Kenneth Lane Thompson, or simply “Ken” as he is called by the hacker community, is an American pioneer of computer science. Thompson designed and implemented the original Unix operating system along with his partner Dennis Ritchie.
He also invented the B programming language, the direct predecessor to the C programming language, and was one of the creators and early developers of the Plan 9 operating systems. Since 2006, Thompson has worked at Google, where he co-invented the Go programming language.
Ken’s other contributions included his work on regular expressions, early computer text editors QED and ed, the definition of the UTF-8 encoding, and even his work on computer chess that included the creation of endgame tablebases and the chess machine Belle.
5. Donald Knuth :
Donald Knuth is an American computer scientist, mathematician, and Professor Emeritus at Stanford University. Knuth is the creator of the TeX computer typesetting system, the related METAFONT font definition language and rendering system, and the Computer Modern family of typefaces. Knuth has been dubbed as the “Father of the Analysis of Algorithms” as he has contributed to the development of rigorous analysis of the computational complexity of algorithms and systematized formal mathematical techniques for it.
He is the author of the multi-volume work The Art of Computer Programming. He contributed to the development of the rigorous analysis of the computational complexity of algorithms and systematized formal mathematical techniques for it. In the process, he also popularized the asymptotic notation. In addition to fundamental contributions in several branches of theoretical computer science.
6. Bjarne Stroustrup :
Bjarne Stroustrup — credited for the creation and development of the widely used C++ programming language. He is a Danish computer scientist and a visiting professor at Columbia University and works at Morgan Stanley as a Managing Director in New York.
7. Tim Berners-Lee :
Sir Timothy John Berners-Lee also known as TimBL, is an English computer scientist, who best known as the inventor of the World Wide Web.
He made a proposal for an information management system in March 1989,and he implemented the first successful communication between a Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) client and server via the Internet sometime around mid-November of that same year.
He is also the founder of the World Wide Web Foundation, and is a senior researcher and holder of the founders chair at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL).
8. Brian Kernighan :
Brian Wilson Kernighan is a Canadian computer scientist who worked at Bell Labs alongside Unix creators Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie and contributed to the development of Unix. He is also coauthor of the AWK and AMPL programming languages.
Kernighan’s name became widely known through co-authorship of the first book on the C programming language with Dennis Ritchie. Kernighan affirmed that he had no part in the design of the C language (“it’s entirely Dennis Ritchie’s work”). He authored many Unix programs, including ditroff.
9. James Gosling :
James Gosling — best known as the father of the Java programming language — is a Canadian computer scientist. He has coded quite a number of programs but is widely known for his creation of the highly successful and commonly used Java programming language in 1994 as well as its original virtual machine and compiler.
James has also made major contributions to several other software systems, such as NeWS and Gosling Emacs. Due to his extraordinary achievements, Gosling was elected to Foreign Associate member of the United States National Academy of Engineering.
10. Guido van Rossum :
Guido van Rossum is a Dutch programmer who is best known as the author of the Python programming language. His creation of Python lead him to be declared a “Benevolent Dictator For Life” the In the Python community which means that he continues to oversee the Python development process, making decisions where necessary, forever.
He was employed by Google from 2005 until 7 December 2012, where he spent half his time developing the Python language. In January 2013, van Rossum started working for Dropbox.
11. Anders Hejlsberg :
Anders Hejlsberg is a prominent Danish software engineer who co-designed several popular and commercially successful programming languages and development tools. He is the creator of popular programming language C#.
He was the original author of Turbo Pascal and the chief architect of Delphi. He currently works for Microsoft as the lead architect of C# and core developer on TypeScript.
12. Bill Gates :
William Henry “Bill” Gates III is an American business magnate, investor, author, and philanthropist. In 1975, Gates and Paul Allen co-founded Microsoft, which became the world’s largest PC software company.
During his career at Microsoft, Gates held the positions of chairman, CEO and chief software architect, and was the largest individual shareholder until May 2014.Gates has authored and co-authored several books. Gates is currently the richest person in the world, with an estimated net worth of US$81.7 billion as of November 2016.
13. Grace Hopper :
Grace Brewster Murray Hopper was an American computer scientist and the United States Navy Rear Admiral. She was one of the first programmers of the Harvard Mark I computer in 1944, invented the first compiler for a computer programming language, and was one of those who popularized the idea of machine-independent programming languages which led to the development of COBOL, one of the first high-level programming languages.
Virtual space is decently “built up” by online stores of various kinds and sizes. Their attractiveness for offline sellers and startups is explained by two main advantages – the simplicity of creating an online platform and large coverage of the target audience. However, 60-90% of online stores are closed during the first year of operation. This percentage could be much lower if business owners did not make the following mistakes when opening online stores.
Sales problems with 90% of new Internet entrepreneurs are not their personal business qualities, but the fact that they have not conducted market research market, target audience (TA) and competitors. Therefore, they do not understand to whom they offer a product or service, do not know the real needs of the audience and do not know how to sell effectively in the selected niche.
Unprocessed business plan
In preparing a business plan, the effectiveness of investments in the online store is assessed according to marketing analysis. It also determines the profitability of the niche, the product group for sale on the Internet, sales channels, payment methods and delivery of orders. “Due to an unrealistic plan for the development of the online store, there are various tricks with the expected profit in the style of” low margin – low turnover “or” high margin – no sales. In the first option, all revenue goes to keep the project afloat. The store is dead rather than alive. In the second option, high margin goods do not find demand among buyers”.
Tech errors at the creation of online store
Unfortunate mistakes are also made at the stage of developing the structure and design of the store. There are many Internet boutiques with overloaded “showcases”. Due to the abundance of graphic information and/or advertising banners focus on the main thing is confused, the attention of the visitor dissipates, and the potential customer goes to competitors. Also, the situation with the structure of the site, usability.
Difficult design
The overloaded or too minimalistic design causes negative associations among visitors, and with such emotions, they are unlikely to make a purchase.
Registration of Internet shop should carry out simultaneously both aesthetic, and practical functions. The detailed study of its structure begins at the stage of prototyping when the framework of the future site is created without design. Only after the prototype is agreed with the customer, it is transferred to the designer”.
One channel of communication with clients
For contact with the administration and managers, there is one or two ways of communication: telephone and/or e-mail. It is unlikely that such a shop will wait for high response and customer loyalty.
Bad usability
Usability – is the convenience and ease of use of the resource. If a user in an online store does not understand how to choose a product, where to place an order and delivery (shipping suite by mageworx would be helpful), what fields to fill in and so on, he will not solve the “rebus”, but just choose another store. Check yours with these “golden rules”:
3-Click Rule – the visitor must get from the main page of the site to the information he needs in a maximum of 3 clicks. Endless series of internal pages will scare away any buyer.
Rule 7 – a person can comfortably perceive 5-7 objects, so you do not need to place on the navigation bar on the site more than 7 points.
Rule 2-second – the longer a visitor expects a response from the resource, the more likely it is that he will close the web page. The optimal period of time for the user to wait for the download of the site section – 2-3 seconds.
The rule of the inverted pyramid – description of goods, articles, reviews should begin with the most useful information for the visitor to the site, confirmed by important data and end with less important material.
If you think carefully about where these errors occur when creating online stores, it becomes clear: all their diversity is reduced to 2 reasons. The first is ignorance of what to do and how to do it, the second is laziness in all this. The second makes you ask a logical question: why do you even need an online store? This is a full work, which requires time, effort and resources. Success is possible if you are ready to learn and teach your team, ready to invest in development. This is the law of any business. But for those who want to eliminate the first, we write materials such as this and hope that our advice will help solve seemingly insoluble problems. Anyway, good luck!
Even as more and more businesses continue building their brand online, there are still those that are skeptical about it. However, having a website increases your brand’s visibility. A well-done site that is easy to navigate through increases the conversion rate.
Hiring a web developer who can deliver a great website should be a top priority as this is what will bring in the clients. You need a site that has a great user interface and experience. As much as you may not know too much tech related to websites, you need to ask your potential developer questions that will help you understand what you are paying for.
Creating your website should give you full ownership of it. Years later, you may need to change it up and add a few extra features to it. Or, you may need to do some rebranding which could ideally involve changing the logo and any information on the site.
Make sure you have control over the following:
DNS access
FTP access
Administrative tasks
A qualified web development company should automatically give you full access to your site.
As a business owner, you may not be accustomed to dealing with such stuff; you could ask for a bit of training so that if you need to rectify something, you can do it yourself. Better still, your development company could help you with such especially if it is in the contract.
2. What theme option do I have for building my website?
Usually, developers will construct your site using an existing theme, customizing an existing theme or building one from scratch.
For the existing themes, they are cheaper and easy to use even for people who are not technical. However, remember that you may share the same theme with other companies and there is a limit to customizing them.
Customizing an existing one will just need very little design work and can work for companies that have a very short deadline.
When you opt for building a theme from scratch, it takes longer than the other options, but you have it designed according to your business objectives. It is expensive though.
Consider the long run benefits and don’t solely base your decision on the cost. Consult the developer and brainstorm through before making the final decision on what theme to choose.
3. Will the website be developed to be mobile friendly?
By now you know that one of the algorithms Google uses is your site’s mobile friendliness. You want it to rank highly on search engines.
Ask your developer if they will optimize the website to be mobile-friendly.
Some of the benefits involved are:
It increases the chances of your visitors staying longer
Site loading speed increases which should be less than two seconds
SEO friendly
As a beginner, you need your website to leave a good first impression to users. It should be responsive as people are naturally impatient and will always leave slow sites in favor to fast loading ones. Nobody wants to receive an error when clicking your site.
Developers should ideally have 24/7 services in case your site breaks down at night bringing an error. Just as https://techloris.com/ has a guide to follow on how to fix a Windows 10 error, so should the company you choose to develop your site.
From the very beginning, ensure the developer builds your website with mobile usage in mind. Remember, a great website attracts people which increases the chances of getting more clients.
4. How do you test your work
An essential phase during web development is testing the functionality of the site. Never skip this stage because it could cost you more. Most especially, if you plan to build an online brand or are in the e-commerce sector, your site needs to be fully functioning.
Ask them what web browsers they use to test if the site is working. People need secure channels when it comes to online payments. First, ensure that your site is HTTPS and when somebody clicks on it, it shows a closed padlock on next to the URL.
5. Do you design according to SEO?
SEO is everything on a website these days. Your developer should know how to code in relation to meeting SEO standards.
A developer who knows their way into SEO knows that script files are meant to be explicitly created for pages but not having the actual script on the web page.
As much as you may hire a content writer to help with optimizing web content in a way that your business becomes visible, you also need a developer who understands how to incorporate it when building the site.
Web development is something you should not take lightly. Hiring the best developer for the project helps you increase your chances of accomplishing your business goals. Have in mind that marketing and your site go hand in hand.
Every invention is the life and hard work of an inventor, and most of them are lucky to present their inventions to the world and receive applause and fame. But there are some inventors who got killed by their invention because of their stupid mistakes or accidental causes. So in this post we are going to share list of inventors killed by their own inventions.
Inventors Killed by their own Inventions – Marie Curie (1867–1934)
Yes we know Marie Curie, a physicist and chemist best known for her work on radioactivity; however, she also discovered the elements polonium and radium. And when someone asks us -“Name some inventors killed by their own inventions”, then first name pops up in our mind will be Marie Curie.
Marie Curie died of aplastic anemia as a result of prolonged exposure to ionizing radiation emanating from her research materials. The dangers of radiation were not well understood at the time. Did you know -She was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, the first person and only woman to win twice, the only person to win twice in multiple sciences.
2. Franz Reichelt (1879–1912)
Inventors Killed by their own Inventions – Franz Reichelt (1879–1912)
Franz Reichelt Austrian-born French tailor, inventor and parachuting pioneer, now sometimes referred to as the Flying Tailor, who is remembered for jumping to his death from the Eiffel Tower while testing a wearable parachute of his own design.
It was his first attempt with the parachute, and he had told the authorities he would first test it with a dummy. So initial experiments conducted with dummies dropped from the fifth floor of his apartment building had been successful, but he was unable to replicate those early successes with any of his subsequent designs.
3. Sylvester H. Roper (1823-1896)
Inventors Killed by their own Inventions – Sylvester H. Roper (1823-1896)
Sylvester H. Roper invented the Roper steam velocipede of 1867–1869 may have been the first motorcycle and also he is also the inventor of the shotgun choke and a revolver repeating shotgun.
On 1 June 1896, Roper rode died one of his later velocipede models with a steam engine added. He was seen to wobble and then fall on the track, suffering a head wound, and was found dead. After autopsy, the cause of death was found to be heart failure, although it is unknown if the crash was the cause of the stress on his heart, or if his heart gave out first which led to the crash.
4. Jean-François Pilâtre de Rozier (1754 – 1785)
Inventors Killed by their own Inventions – Jean-François Pilâtre de Rozier (1754 – 1785)
Jean-François Pilâtre de Rozier was a French chemistry and physics teacher, and one of the first pioneers of aviation. He and the Marquis d’Arlandes made the first manned free balloon flight on 21 November 1783. And he was the first known fatality in an air crash when his Rozière balloon crashed on 15 June 1785 while he and Pierre Romain attempted to cross the English Channel.
5. Horace Lawson Hunley (1823-1863)
Inventors Killed by their own Inventions – Horace Lawson Hunley (1823-1863)
Horace Lawson Hunley , Confederate marine engineer and inventor of the first combat submarine, Hunley, died during a trial of his vessel. During a routine test of the submarine, which had already suffered one accident, Hunley took command. After failing to resurface, Hunley and the seven other crew members drowned. The vessel was later raised and used again in the first successful sinking of an enemy vessel (the USS Housatonic in 1864) by a submarine in naval history, but the submarine soon sank too.
6. William Bullock (1813-1867)
Inventors Killed by their own Inventions – William Bullock (1813-1867)
The father of the web rotary printing press and modern printing was killed by his own invention in a bizarre accident. Bullock tried to kick a driving belt onto a pulley but his leg was caught in the machine and crushed. Nine days later, he died during the operation to amputate his crushed limb, which had become infected with gangrene.
7. Aurel Vlaicu (1882-1913)
Inventors Killed by their own Inventions – Aurel Vlaicu (1882-1913)
The builder of the first metal plane in the world died while attempting to cross the Carpathian mountains for the first time in the arrow-shaped Vlaicu II airplane on September 13, 1913.
8. Valerian Abakovsky (1895-1921)
Inventors Killed by their own Inventions – Valerian Abakovsky (1895-1921)
The Latvian-born inventor of the experimental high-speed railcar with an aero engine and propellers named Aerowagon—precursor to the German Schienenzeppelin—died on the return route to Moscow after a successful test. The railcar derailed and killed six passengers.
9. Max Valier (1895-1930)
Inventors Killed by their own Inventions – Max Valier (1895-1930)
In the late 1920s, rocketry pioneer Valier and Fritz von Opel were working on rocket-powered cars and aircraft. The first successful test firing with liquid fuel was performed in January 1930, and on April 19, Valier performed the first test drive of a rocket car with liquid propulsion.
On May 17, during another test, the alcohol-fuelled rocket exploded on his test bench and Valier was killed.
10. Henry Smolinski (1933-1973)
Inventors Killed by their own Inventions – Henry Smolinski (1933-1973)
Smolinski and his partner, Hal Blake, founded Advanced Vehicle Engineers in 1971 to design and build a flying car. Their first (and only) prototype was the AVE Mizar, which combined a Ford Pinto with a rear end of a Cessna. The wings fell off during a routine flight, killing both of the engineers.
Can I correct the error of the damaged memory card without formatting it and still recover the data? This morning, when I tried to share some photos on my phone via Facebook, I received an error message on the SD card – “the SD card is damaged. Try to format it. ”
When I tried to format it, I soon remembered that “Formatting SD card” would delete all my files. As there are many important files, including hundreds of images, a collection of my favorite movies and dozens of documents, decide first of all to try to recover the card without losing my data.
Is there any reliable damaged SD card video recovery solution that I can use to fix the SD card error without formatting? I researched and found two ways to recover the damaged memory card.
The first option is through a simple Windows process, which in my case did not work.
The second alternative was to use data recovery software, with this action getting back all my files but not being able to reuse the card.
When your memory card is damaged or corrupted, your data will be in danger. If you try to open it on your computer, Windows will remember that the card is not accessible because the file or directory is corrupted and unreadable. At this time, you can try two solutions to recover a damaged or corrupted SD card, using chkdsk or third-party data recovery software to fix the card and recover lost files.
Before you begin, one thing you should note is that you will need to stop using the damaged SD card until you fully recover your files, or you may suffer from data recovery failures.
I will not discuss how you use chkdsk, you can look for it on Google, it has been discussed a lot. I will discuss the second way, using third-party software and my recommendation is Recoverit.
Why you need Recoverit
Recoverit is a professional data recovery software that can be used to recover deleted, formatted or inaccessible data on various devices, including it is possible to recover pen drive and memory card files. Recoverit is also known as reliable video recovery software.
The memory card is one of the favorite devices that users use to store photos, videos, and audio, especially in Smartphones. That’s why we recommend Recoverit, with its powerful data recovery capability and friendly interface, is the best choice for restoring deleted photos from your memory card or other devices.
How to use the tool
Step 1: You need to download and install the software version according to your operating system. Note that after installing the program the step by step to be followed is the same, regardless if you use Windows or Mac.
Step 2: With the program already installed, connect your SD card to the computer and in the main window click on the option “Recovery of external devices” to begin the process of restoration.
Recover files from memory card
Step 2: On the next screen will appear the various devices that you can select to continue the recovery process. In our tutorial, we are teaching how to recover the memory card.
Then you will need to select the SD Card option.
Memory card recovered
Step 3: In this step, after your computer identifies the device, you will also be shown important information on the card, such as name, storage standard, and total and available capacity.
Usually, when you select the SD Card option in the previous step, only one available drive will appear; this is because most computers have only one input for this type of device.
Select the drive that matches the name of your Card and click “Start.”
Step 4: When you have completed the scan, you will be able to preview all the files and you can select the data you want to recover. As easy as that.
Often the memory card damage is a difficult thing to avoid, but with special software, you don’t need to worry.
Do you have a passion for technology, and are interested in cybersecurity? If so, then a career as a cybersecurity specialist might be the one for you! In this article, we are going to talk about the role of a cybersecurity specialist, their skill set requirements, and other facts that you will need to know if you plan to move into this career. Want to learn more about how much you can earn as a cybersecurity professional? Learn more before reading on about the job specifics here.
A Cyber Security Specialist is generally hired by a company to protect its data. They do this by ensuring that their technology systems are protected. They probe for weaknesses that may be visible and test to see if anything can be hacked from the outside. Some of their key responsibilities in the workplace include:
Implementing security measures
Developing software systems and data centers
Monitoring for attacks
Eliminating any breaches
Probe for possible security risks
Skillset:
To work in a cybersecurity role, it requires an advanced skill set and a large range of desirable qualities. Some of these include:
To become a cybersecurity specialist, it is usually advised that you have a degree in a related area. Some of the degrees that apply to this include:
IT
Computer Science
Networks and Security
Network Engineering
Forensic Computing
Average Salary:
Although job requirements can be different from company to company, the average salary for a cybersecurity specialist is around $70 000.
Overview:
So there you have it! Still interested in being a cybersecurity specialist? Go for it! Working in this role may require a degree and advanced skill set, but it is, however, hugely rewarding, and some individuals find it thrilling to work in stressful conditions to assist a company. Still, aren’t sure if this is the right job for you? Try taking a career test online.
In 2019, British Airways were ordered to pay a fine of approximately $230 million for a data breach that occurred in 2018. This has been the most substantial penalty that an organisation has had to pay for lapses on data security under the new European data protection law. The data breach at British Airways occurred when hackers diverted over 500,000 of the airline’s customers to fraudulent sites where customer credentials, including financial information and travel data, were stolen. The new General Data Protection Regulation, also known as GDPR has enabled European policymakers and regulators with added bite, to issue penalties of up to 4% of an organisation’s global revenue for a data breach.
Currently, Google and Facebook are other large organisations under investigation over data breaches of the GDPR law, even though they have already paid a sum as a penalty towards the disclosed breaches.
The threat of hefty penalties looming large over companies can be considered as a motivating factor for companies to examine cybersecurity across their departments more carefully.
Policymakers find that the GDPR law could help companies become more cautious about client and customer data that these organisations collect and store. User information gathered by almost every organisation today uses customer data to improve their marketability and sell more products and services; but, given the importance of that data, it is just as crucial for hackers and cybercriminals.
In most cases, it is seen that in spite of cybersecurity and best practices in an organisation, data breaches take place. This can happen if employees click on fraudulent websites, infected attachments, phishing emails and malware that are rapidly spread throughout the company. And while British Airways has been charged about 1.5% of the airline’s annual revenue as a penalty, policymakers have stated that they would consider responses from the airline before issuing the final penalty decision.
At around the same time that British Airways was charged, the Marriott hotel chain too was imposed with $124 million for a data breach that took place in 2014.
Large international chains such as the Marriott hotel have customer data from across the world, and hence policymakers opine that they should have been monitoring their security more effectively. However, cybercriminals were steadily breaching data from the Marriott group of hotels for four years consecutively, which is an alarming factor to consider. The four-year-long breach that involved personal and financial information of over 500 million guests was a colossal intrusion that went undetected without a whimper.
This points out that there was a failure in adopting the most critical principle of cyber security defence, which is assuming there has been a compromise. It is vital for every company to accept this principle, which means that they are no longer safe and secure, regardless of the cybersecurity technology or policies they have in place. Assuming this notion can bring about increased alertness among employees and management to look into all forms of basic and advanced defence mechanisms, such as applying software patches, employing the latest anti-virus and malware technologies and using cutting-edge technologies such as Digital Rights Management (DRM) to protect documents and data.
It is crucial for decision-makers to implement DRM that is a proven technology in safeguarding intellectual property, client information and confidential data.
In the case of the Marriott data breach, the incident came to light, when they discovered that a company that they had acquired had been breached.
Essential activities for any company conducting mergers and acquisition activities must have robust cybersecurity assessment and solutions in place such as DRM, to understand and cover all vulnerabilities. Modern business acquisitions these days are prime fodder for hacking and cybercriminal activity. Confidential information within the company, including personally identifiable data, payment card information and other critical data must be securely safeguarded with data loss prevention tools such as DRM that can ensure that information does not reach unintended users, while at the same time permitted access is stringently controlled and monitored.
It can help to have an adversarial and proactive approach in protecting data through third-party resources such as DRM to uncover and protect all kinds of organisational data vulnerabilities.
Although employing training tools, instruction modules to office staff and implementing data breach attack simulations can be best security practices for preventing data breaches, it may still not be enough to understand the specific flaws that can lead to a data breach. However, they are still worthwhile endeavours in preventing hacking or data intrusions.
At the end of the day, having in-depth defence mechanisms and varied layers of cybersecurity tools, including Digital Rights Management, can well be the answer to safeguarding data in an organisation.
