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Ask five different people on the street what “cybersecurity” means to them, and you will likely get five different answers. In a general, you might get answers about setting up a technology infrastructure with protection against hackers or leveraging AI to protect a computer from malware.

In our latest newsletter, Continuous CEO Jason Silverglate and CTO Ross Brouse wrote a little about the importance of training employees on information security best practices. (You’re already subscribed, right?) In addition to outlining some of the risks that come with inattentive or outright malicious employees, they also offered a few tips for onboarding new staff and retraining current team members.

Late last March, the infrastructure of Atlanta was brought to its knees. More than a third of 424 programs used nearly every day by city officials of all types, including everyone from police officers to trash collectors to water management employees, were knocked out of commission.

You remember how those curly cords on old telephones would invariably end up mangled after a few years of use, all of the coils starting to twist the wrong way and forming into clumps that foreshortened the distance you could stretch the receiver from the cradle?

Well, someday soon complaints about the drawbacks of traditional telephony as a whole will sound just as dated.

Whether or not you tend to celebrate the turning over of the calendar with excessive libations, for most of us the New Year’s hangover is a fact of life.

In reality, December 31st and January 1st are just days like any other, but the arbitrary significance we assign to the passing of a year provides an opportunity for reflection.

Scams are nearly as old as commerce itself. When you think of iconic scams, you might consider the image of the “3-Card Monte” dealer on the corner of a busy city intersection. These are examples of verified scams, but have you considered more “legitimate” forms of con artistry?

How about those games at the state fair that seem so easy but are commonly understood to be rigged? Or a huge bag of potato chips that end up being only half full when you open them up.

A landmine is a scary piece of equipment. It’s an explosive device, placed in the ground and trigged only when an unwitting individual comes within a proximity of the mine, or worse, steps directly on the device.

The effects landmines are horrifying in a very real way.

Is your router spying on you? Think about how much trust you place on that little device which converts the signal from your ISP and connects all your devices to the internet.

Are you in compliance when it comes to storing customer data? Are you exposing your business to risk from bad actors and potential fines from regulators with a lax attitude towards data security?

How many times a day do you look at your smartphone? Could this be bad for your long-term health?

These are the questions that we explore in this edition of the Continuous technology news round-up.

In a somewhat ironic scenario, many businesses still have those red metal emergency boxes attached to the walls within their offices. The idea is that in the event of a fire, someone would break the glass and retrieve a fire extinguisher or fire hose in order to put out the blaze and thus save the day.

The old saying goes, “The road to Hell is paved with good intentions”. We’re not sure who originally came up with that statement, but if it came out that an IT manager was the source, it would not surprise us.

It’s well understood that business owners certainly do not design their IT infrastructure with the intention of creating situations that result in data breaches and send out compromised data to the dark web – but it happens more often than we'd care to admit.