Many organizations are subject to government regulations such as ITAR or OFAC that prohibit any dealings with certain foreign nations. Others have countries that they will not do business with for reasons of corporate policy - because of rampant piracy or fraud for example. However with the Internet, what matters isn't always where another computer is located, at least not from the domain name it reports or the place a user fills in as its contact address. This means that, wittingly or unwittingly, devices in any organization may be connecting with other machines in locations that they are legally forbidden to have any communication with.

Looking for an affordable alternative to Cisco Umbrella Enterprise's high cost? ThreatSTOP comes with advanced reporting and security research tools out-of-the-box. See blocked threats, remediate client machines faster and check IOC’s. Here's a breakdown of how ThreatSTOP and Cisco line up.

As we’re approaching the holiday season, so many are heavily relying on the internet for their shopping. With fewer than 50 online shopping days until Christmas, pressure to bargain hunt is skyrocketing, with retailers gearing up to make tempting offers on those dream items. However, it's not just the online retailers gearing up to take your money, the online criminals are, too.

On the Kaspersky SecureList blog there's an interesting post about recent developments for the SpyEye malware. The blogger explains how SpyEye supports a nice plugin architecture and how he examined an interesting new plugin that downloads a flash plugin for certain banking sites which can then switch on the victim's webcam and stream the data back to the crooks.

Blocking foreign countries is one of the simplest and most effective ways to stop data loss and other hack attacks. If your computers/servers/users ... have no reason to communicate with devices in certain countries then a geographic block on the firewall to stop all traffic to/from them is a great way to reduce the threat of infection or data loss. What may be the most serious data breach ever - the loss of some 35 million records of personal data from the Korean company SK Comunications - would have been stopped if the SK Comunications computers had been blocked from communicating with China:

Many organizations are subject to government regulations such as ITAR or OFAC that prohibit any dealings with certain foreign nations. Many others have countries that they will not do business with for reasons of corporate policy - because of rampant piracy or fraud for example. However with the Internet it isn't always where another computer is located. At least not from the domain name it reports or the place a user fills in as contact address. This means that, wittingly or unwittingly, computers in any organization may be connecting with other computers in locations that they are legally forbidden to have any communication with.