A State of the Internet Report by researchers from Akamai shows a huge increase in the first quarter of 2016 in so called distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks.

The research from the U.S. content delivery network (CDN) and cloud services provider showed a massive 19 such attacks that exceeded 100 Gbps took place in the first quarter of this year, compared to only 5 on the last quarter of 2015.

The previous record for DDoS attacks was 17 back in the third quarter of 2014.

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The latest high profile data security breach has been identified as MySpace.

News of the breach which involved what appears to be the theft of customer details from an old MySpace database was made public first by LeakedSource who are reported to have received a copy of the breached data from one of their users. LeakedSource offer a subscription service that enables people to search for their usernames on hacked sites to see if they have been compromised.

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The recently published results of the annual Computer Weekly/TechTarget IT Priorities poll show that server virtualisation is a now top area of planned datacentre infrastructure investment.

The poll results are significant and important because they reflect the investment plans for the coming year of 1,000 European IT managers and decision makers.

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In 2018 the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) will come into force and UK companies doing business in Europe will therefore need to be prepared in order to ensure compliance.

With this in mind what kind of things should you be thinking about in order to ensure that your company stays on the right side EU data protection law?

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Phishing – as defined by a quick Google search is “the fraudulent practice of sending emails purporting to be from reputable companies in order to induce individuals to reveal personal information, such as passwords and credit card numbers, online.

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There are several risks you are exposed to in the case of a hacker attack: theft of customer information (such as address or credit card details), reduced income, damaged reputation, to name but a few.

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The Cloud Industry forum found in 2014 that 86% of small and medium sized enterprises had adopted some form of cloud-based technology within their IT system. Over half of the businesses polled in the survey said that they expected cloud-based services to take over all of their IT estate “at some point soon” with 16% saying “as soon as possible”.

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In today’s world of technology and mass information, almost all companies require some level of IT support, from international corporations to home-based businesses. Whether you need help setting up a new PC or synchronising Microsoft Office 365 across your business, IT support currently falls into one of three categories; time and material, the customer knows what he/she needs and pays for the time and materials needed; block hours, when the customer buys a certain amount of hours which they can use as and when they want, popular with small businesses; managed services, an ongoing contract that covers up to 24/7 IT support for a business.

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With the exponential growth of the internet, has come the mass input of sensitive personal data, from credit card details to passport numbers. Unfortunately this has brought with it new online threats, with data prone to attack from hackers and viruses.

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