An incident response plan is defined as the documentation of a predetermined set of instructions or procedures to detect, respond to, and limit the consequences of malicious cyber-attacks or an organization’s information systems. In shorter, simpler terms, it’s the written plan your team has to respond to specific problems with your IT systems.

Haters may call it alphabet soup or too confusing to care about, but here at PTG, we’re pretty keen on all of our acronyms and what they represent. Not only are there dozens of terms to remember, making these shortened versions the perfect little helper, but writing PAM instead of things like Privileged Access Management over and over again saves time and space. It's our goal to simplify these complex topics into something a little more palatable- if you will.

Today’s alphabet soup is a hearty helping of security from your favorite chefs in the industry. Instead of harping on MFA and EDR or even PAM for your SMB, today our IT topic may be a little longer than a TL;DR but covers an equally important topic: IAM.

We deal with a lot of complex topics here, and our goal is always to clarify them. Privledged Access Management, or PAM for short, is one of the topics we believe all of our partners should be well-versed on no matter their line of work.

Thinking critically, and a little bit for fun, we were trying to come up with other ways “Endpoint” and EDR could be misinterpreted or misunderstood. Maybe the end of a maze, or a weird way to think about the idea of a finish line? An offshoot of the revolutionary dancing video game Dance Dance Revolution (DDR), even.

This blog isn’t about fish, fishers, or fishing of any kind. Nor is this about the jam band your brother Spencer followed around for a few years after college. This blog is about one of the most pervasive and surprisingly effective tools that nefarious types use to gain access to your information: Phishing.

Statista posits that 320 billion emails were sent in 2021 and 375 billion are estimated to be sent by 2025. That is 12,000 emails per second, meaning there are a whole bunch of opportunities for phishing to happen.

And it seems, no matter how robust your system and strategy, phishing attempts still find success. Those trying to access your information are getting better at slipping those phishing attacks through the weak spots in platform email defenses. Leaning on a variety of advanced techniques, they're also doing more targeting and research on victims than ever before.