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After a relatively quiet few months in the data breach world, June featured a surge in news surrounding the compromise of personal information. Relatively small breaches were reported in Texas, New Jersey, and a host of other states. But the biggest announcement came from the United States federal government, which revealed that cyberattackers had hacked into the Office of Personnel Management in December 2014, gaining access to unencrypted data on more than four million federal workers.

Cyberattackers are adept at finding new ways to ply their nefarious trade — some of the more elaborate scams we’ve detailed over the years include fraudulent Microsoft support calls, health care enrollment phishing attempts, and business email compromise.

Back in January, we wrote about Windows Server 2003, which Microsoft will end support for in July 14th. Remember the build-up last year for the death of Windows XP? A similar scenario will play out in 2015, as Microsoft announced in November that July 14th would mark the end of life for Windows Server 2003 and Server 2003 R2.

The most immediate impact of this announcement is that any system using Windows Server 2003 will no longer receive updates or patches from Microsoft, which the computing giant said in a white paper “can result in a less stable and less secure infrastructure for your organization.

Hurricane season officially started on Monday, June 1st. And although the NOAA estimates that this year will be a slow one for tropical formation in the Atlantic Ocean, the occasion still highlights the importance of disaster preparedness — especially in light of the devastating thunderstorms, tornados, and floods that struck a broad swath of the country in April and May.

Microsoft is not shy about nudging its business customers into the future. Whether it was the all-out blitz of last year’s death of Windows XP campaign, or this year’s ongoing effort to ease enterprises away from Windows Server 2003, the message comes across loud and clear: when Microsoft stops supporting a product, you really don’t want to be left using it.

The world’s most popular productivity suite, Microsoft Office, has been in the news lately, with the consumer preview of Office 2016 debuting last week. But before you get excited about that shiny new upgrade, which won’t even be available for several months, remember that existing versions of Microsoft Word, Excel, Outlook, and PowerPoint still offer plenty of supercharged abilities.

PCI compliance — sounds complicated, right? Here’s the most important thing to know on the topic: if your business accepts major credit cards as payment, you’re required to comply.

Visa, MasterCard, American Express, Discover, and JCB created the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard in 2004 to improve protection for card issuers by ensuring that merchants meet minimum standards for the storage, processing, and transmission of cardholder data.

Earlier this year, flaws were discovered in Adobe Flash Player that could allow malicious banner ads running on legitimate websites to infect unwitting computer users.

These “malvertising” exploits have been shown to produce a variety of consequences; some install malware that illicitly inflates ad click numbers, while others can immediately encrypt all files on a user’s local and network drive.

Tuesday, March 31st was World Backup Day, which provides the perfect opportunity to take a serious look at the state of your systems. Is your backup drive located next to your computer? Are you entrusting your critical business data to a free (or cheap) backup option that isn’t built for the business world? Is your current backup solution shored up by disaster recovery, business continuity, and virtualization plans?

And before you think, “Data loss could never happen to me,” consider these statistics:

A 2013 Harris Interactive poll found that 30% of computer users had NEVER backed up their data
FEMA and SBA studies show that 25% to 45% of businesses don’t reopen after a disaster
According to a 2013 Aberdeen group report, Inc.