Rita Nygren

The State of Security

The current pandemic has certainly shown the utility of electronic collaboration tools such as videoconferencing platforms. Once an expensive perk of solely enterprise companies, the video call is now used not only for executives remotely attending board meetings but also for the following: Sales calls Partnered coding Team standups Chats ... Read More

The most recent National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) guidelines have been updated for passwords in section 800-63B. The document no longer recommends combinations of capital letters, lower case letters, numbers and special characters. Yet most companies and systems still mandate these complexity requirements for passwords. What gives? There’s ... Read More

Requesting that a SaaS company answer a Vendor Security request has become a regular thing for companies who work in the cloud. But have you thought about how the reverse works, that is, when your customer has a VSA process focusing on you? The Vendor Security Assessment, or VSA, is ... Read More

I recently volunteered as an AV tech at a science communication conference in Portland, OR. There, I handled the computers of a large number of presenters, all scientists and communicators who were passionate about their topic and occasionally laissez-faire about their system security. As exacting as they were with the ... Read More

Human nature has shown that people re-use passwords, at least for non-work accounts that aren’t requiring quarterly changes. How can it affect your current security that you’ve reused an old password or passphrase from 2012? Surprisingly, quite a lot. Hashed passwords and the plain text equivalent from a breached site ... Read More