June 17, 2023

Why Should Companies Do a Background Check Before Hiring?

job interview, finance, Hiring
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Background checks provide valuable information to help you make the right hiring decisions. These checks can reveal facts the candidate might not have disclosed in their resume or job application.

Having reliable employees is critical for any business. Background checks can protect you from negligent hiring claims, privacy violations, and other legal issues.

To Protect Yourself
After putting so much time into crafting a solid resume, securing an interview, and nailing your first job, it's understandable that you would want to ensure everything on your background check is clean. However, anything might sneak past your employer throughout the background check procedure if you must be more diligent. Falsifying information on your resume or application is more common than you might think. While this might not be illegal, it is unethical and will be picked up during a background check. Note that some background checks have higher accuracy than others. Choosing a reputable company that offers background screening services will ensure that you get accurate and legitimate results. Additionally, it is the responsibility of the background check business to fix any errors and notify the applicant. It will help to avoid any misinformation from being reported and costing the candidate their job.

To Protect Your Reputation
The actions or inactions of employees can damage the reputation of an organization. Conducting a background check allows organizations to protect their brand by learning the facts about potential hires. It is essential to adhere to laws regarding what can and cannot be searched within a background check and to respect the candidate's or employee's right to privacy. Verifying someone's identification is the most frequent cause for a background check. People often lie on their resumes or job applications about past work experience or education; background checks can catch these lies. A background check can validate addresses, phone numbers, and social media profiles.

To Protect Your Customers
A background check can help protect your customers from fraudulent activities committed by people with criminal records, such as identity theft, financial fraud, and other crimes. It also reveals a candidate's education, work history, and professional licensing or credentials to confirm their qualifications. The subject must be informed about and provided permission for the search for the background investigation to be done correctly. It is usually a part of an employment or rental application, and state and local laws often require it. A background check can also be conducted for a personal relationship with someone you know, such as a babysitter or roommate. However, it must be done legally and responsibly through social media searches or Google. It is a common way people vet acquaintances without violating their legal rights.

To Protect Your Company
Background checks help to protect your organization from fraudulent activities that can come from the people you hire. It is essential for positions that involve access to cash or confidential data.

A standard background check typically includes a criminal record search, credit report, and Social Security number verification. In addition, some searches may go further to reveal other civil court records, including bankruptcy filings, lawsuits, and judgments. Motor vehicle and education records are also common searches that can be included in a background check. Some employers run a background check before extending a conditional job offer. To be sure something is permitted, check the laws of your state. It's not a good idea to only perform a background check once you have narrowed down your candidate pool, as this could be considered discriminatory. Depending on the position and your company's needs, you can expand your background check to include additional searches such as sex offender registry, credit history, professional licenses, and more.
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June 10, 2023

Understanding the Role of a CASB in Cloud Security Management


Security gaps grew as traditional security services were displaced by users’ cloud applications and data access. A CASB fills these gaps with deep visibility and control. Ensure the CASB you select provides significant visibility into both sanctioned and unsanctioned (shadow) cloud apps. It should also offer considerable threat protection based on UEBA, including logging and alerts of suspicious behavior, and protect sensitive data using encryption, tokenization, or other mechanisms.

Visibility
Visibility is a core capability that ensures a cloud access security broker can see the data your organization uses in cloud applications. It enables your teams to detect shadow IT — unapproved services — and rogue or compromised accounts. It’s essential for detecting and limiting access to sensitive information in the cloud, including PCI, PHI, and PII data. Security gaps appeared as enterprises accelerated the formal adoption of IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, and FaaS resources. To combat this, CASBs have evolved cloud-focused services and products that provide visibility of multi-cloud traffic. Traditionally, these tools used proxy mode to terminate/re-originate traffic from the network firewall, which created significant architectural and operational complexity with disjointed management. However, a new generation of CASBs offers an alternative approach that combines traffic intercept with threat protection to improve security performance. This next-generation model removes the need for proxy agents and reduces the attack surface through deep threat inspection. It also enables IT to identify and prioritize critical threats based on contextual intelligence instead of relying on hundreds of alerts from separate tools. This dramatically improves the efficiency of security teams and enables them to respond quickly to business risks. In addition, many CASB solutions use machine learning to automate threat alerts and responses — and deliver a more accurate prioritization that addresses the growing problem of alert fatigue.

Compliance
With the growth of bring-your-own-device programs and unsanctioned employee app usage (Shadow IT), CASBs offer critical visibility into both cloud applications that are deployed by the organization’s IT team (sanctioned apps) and those that are not (unsanctioned apps). With this information, IT teams can enforce policy to ensure compliance with industry security standards, corporate policies, and regulatory requirements such as HIPAA and GDPR and prevent data leaks. To do this, CASBs perform auto-discovery to compile and continuously update a list of all cloud apps used by the organization, their affiliated employees and students, and the sensitive data they contain or share. CASBs then classify each application, determining its risk factor using a combination of heuristics, community trust ratings, and other criteria. They also provide insight into the users of a particular application to identify risks hidden by an otherwise benign use case. Many CASBs are also designed to operate in a hybrid mode, combining proxying with API control. This allows them to leverage the capabilities of a cloud service provider and offers faster deployment, more comprehensive coverage, and support for unmanaged devices. They also allow for more robust protection features such as malware detection, sandboxing, device profiling, and network segmentation. In addition, they enable granular access controls to stop downloads of malicious files on managed devices and apply protection labels to unmanaged devices.

Threat Prevention
Organizations must protect the application layer against cyber threats as they move their sensitive data to the cloud. For this, CASBs need to have solid threat prevention capabilities that can recognize data patterns of known malware and other hazards to detect them quickly. In addition to detecting known threats, CASBs need to be able to identify new, emerging, and sophisticated attacks. This requires them to perform detailed logging, establish consistent operating patterns and use user behavior analytics to find anomalies. Furthermore, they need to have the ability to protect against attacks involving sensitive data, such as payment card industry (PCI), personally identifiable information (PII), or protected health information (PHI). CASBs can use encryption, pseudonymization, and tokenization to replace data with non-sensitive information. Many CASBs have this functionality, but enterprises need to be more robust.

Moreover, they are limited in preventing threats from entering the enterprise over public cloud connections. To overcome this limitation, CASBs can integrate with other security and network technologies to provide comprehensive web and cloud security. For example, they can be paired with secure Web gateways or next-generation firewall-integrated cloud solutions to offer a complete set of features to mitigate against the latest cloud threats.

Security Analytics
Organizations deploying various cloud-based applications to support the business must address the risk associated with unsanctioned apps (shadow IT). The CASB can help by providing visibility into both managed and unmanaged apps. This includes determining what data is being accessed by these applications and identifying potential breaches. Depending on the application, it may be necessary to disconnect from the service to reduce risk. A CASB should provide strong threat protection capabilities to prevent data loss and minimize the impact of a breach. This typically involves detecting sensitive data as it is uploaded to a cloud service – whether sanctioned or shadow – and then blocking, deleting, putting in a legal hold, or quarantining content flagged for policy violation. It also requires the ability to detect malware introduced through cloud sync services or the use of a compromised account or password. The best CASB solutions provide the functionality described above to enable companies to safely support various cloud applications and business practices while meeting the organization’s security requirements. 
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June 5, 2023

Taffy and Caramels For Every Occasion

Every occasion deserves to be celebrated. From Birthdays to Weddings, Holidays to Baby Showers, and more, here are a few ideas for Taffy and Caramels to help you celebrate.

A traditional taffy recipe calls for melting molasses and sugar with water to make it a soft chewable candy. This can be done at home or a party.

Birthdays
A sweet and salty treat to share with family or friends, a special birthday treat, or a fun-filled holiday gifting opportunity. Whether it's a big daddy birthday bash or just a little get-together, our deliciously crafted treats are sure to impress. We have everything from taffy to fudge and even hand-dipped chocolates.

Much research went into each confectionary creation's design, construction, and testing. It's all a part of our mission to provide the best candy for your buck.

The company's name Purple Mountain Taffy has earned a reputation for producing the highest quality saltwater, taffy, and creamy fudge.

Weddings
Weddings are an excellent time for family and friends to gather, so you should offer them something special to remember. Taffy is a perfect choice for gifting and celebrating.

If your wedding is beach themed, fill jars and bowls with classic boardwalk candies like saltwater taffy. It comes in an array of carnival colors and looks enticing on display.

Another way to add color is with foil-covered chocolate balls. These bright treats look delicious, piled at a table or in a candy buffet.

Black licorice can also be a good wedding choice, as jars look classy. It may even have a pleasant aroma, too!

Baby Showers
If you're a parent-to-be, baby showers are a special occasion to celebrate the upcoming arrival of your child. They can be a fun way to meet new friends, give gifts, and show your support for the expecting mother.

A lot of planning goes into a shower, from the location and invitations to games and food. It's essential to remember the expectant parents' personalities and pick a venue that will suit their tastes and desires.

Some hosts choose to register for gifts, which is a practical way to ensure that guests get the best gift for the baby's needs. Others prefer to keep things low-key and let family members buy gifts from a list.

Graduations
Graduation season is a particular time to celebrate your loved one. So make their day extra special with these graduation candy ideas!

Taffy is a fun and chewy treat. It's made with boiled sugar, butter, vegetable oil, flavorings, and coloring.

A sweet and chewy taffy is a great way to celebrate your grad. This taffy comes in assorted flavors and is perfect for gifting!

A graduation candy table can be simple or elaborate. Either way, you can easily keep it festive by using cute toppers and signs.

Holidays
Holidays and special occasions are perfect times to indulge in delicious sweet treats! Treat your family and friends with taffy gifts and caramels to satisfy their sweet tooth.

Caramel apple taffy is a fall favorite that's delicious and chewy. It's freeze-dried for a fresh taste and texture that's hard to resist!

You can even try homemade taffy with recipes like salty chocolate brittle or chewy watermelon gummies. Make a batch with your kids, or plan a taffy pull party with your friends!

Taffy isn't just a fun treat for kids; it also makes a great homemade gift. Wrap them up in festive holiday cellophane or waxed paper for a fun and thoughtful gift that will delight the caramel lover on your list.
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