With all the discussion around cybercrime and phishing attacks, we know that pesky Nigerian princes or long-lost millionaire relatives are out to steal our money. We probably don’t suspect the ATM at the convenience store down the street. Unfortunately, ATMs and points of sale aren’t always safe, as more and more thieves are using credit card skimmers to steal credit card information.
Do You Know The True Cost of Downtime?
Most business owners know the feeling… they head into the office early one morning, anxious to get to work on a critical meeting the next day. But when they arrive, they discover that their network is down, their email isn’t working, and the files they need are gone. Then they learn that their network is going to be down for at least a full week – maybe more.
The cause: Their six and a half-year-old server just died.
Critical Cyber Insurance Loopholes You Should Know About
Faced with the growing threat of hacks and data breaches, more and more businesses are looking toward cyber liability insurance to protect themselves. Being proactive about cybercrime is a good thing. Unfortunately, many cyber insurance policies have gaps in coverage that can leave your business vulnerable.
The cyber security field is exploding in popularity, but it is still a young field, and cyber insurance is equally immature. There’s little standard language for defining coverage, and every policy is a little different in terms of what’s included and what’s not. Businesses need to be careful to read the fine print.
3 Lessons from the Google Phishing Scam
If you haven’t heard, a super-sneaky phishing attack posing as Google Docs recently rampaged among Gmail users. The cleverly disguised email only took a couple clicks (through a REAL Google site!) to access your email account and forward the phishing email to everyone in your contact list. Google reacted quickly to stop the attack, but it spread like wildfire while it was active because it was so hard to detect.
Here’s how it worked:
7 Tips to Defend Against a Data Disaster
One click may be all it takes…
You’re checking your email Monday morning, cup of coffee in hand. You mark a few to follow up, confirm a meeting for the afternoon, and then delete a couple of junk promotional emails. But then you come across one that looks important – and it’s about an overdue invoice. You click on it and open the attached document to see what the problem is. Little did you know, a malicious file that was embedded in that document is now infecting your system, spreading like wildfire across your network.
Suddenly a note pops up on your screen:
The Top 5 Worst IT Blunders of 2016
Last year was a year filled with security gaffes, data breaches, and hacks—many of which were felt country and even nationwide. Well-known organizations such as Yahoo, the NSA, and the IRS each had to deal with their own security breaches that found millions of user accounts compromised or exposed to malicious third parties. Everything from login details to personally identifiable information (PII) was released or obtained by hackers in 2016; but the attacks didn’t stop with just looted data.
Larger attacks occurred during Q3 and Q4, seeming to serve only a single purpose: disruption. There were also breaches revealed in 2016 that actually occurred years prior (much to the public’s dismay), which indicates that not only were many of these companies not capable of detecting the breach, but that they also most likely didn’t have any kind of recovery plan in place to handle the aftermath of being compromised.
While ‘blunder’ might seem like a harsh word for victims of a hack, the majority of companies could have done a lot more to mitigate the damage of their respective breaches. A noticeable percentage of the affected groups also didn’t immediately come forward about the hacks, which also constitutes a blunder, albeit a legal and PR related one.
The following summaries highlight five of the most prolific IT blunders to go down in 2016.
Benefits of an Efficient Remote Office
More than a mere convenience, telecommuting—working from a home or other remote office—provides employees and employers with some fairly impressive benefits. It hasn’t always been easy allowing employees to work remotely due to technology constraints and an inability to monitor the success of the stay-at-home worker. However, advances in both hardware and software are giving businesses the opportunity to push the limits of efficiency and make remote offices as productive, if not more so, than the actual office.
How to Properly Vet Your IT Consultant
A skilled and knowledgeable IT consultant can do wonders for your business, regardless of whether you’re a small business or a larger enterprise. Unfortunately, the reverse is true for IT consultants who are only interested in turning a profit. If their priorities don’t align with yours or they can’t handle your company’s needs, they can cause significant damage to your data infrastructure and your wallet.
The first thing you need to do is determine whether you need an in-house IT team/consultant or if hiring a third party out-of-house will satisfy your needs. In many cases, you may only need out-of-house assistance, which is fine; but the caveat with hiring consultants is that you should always apply the same vetting process to them as you would for full-time hires. An IT consultant can and likely will play a crucial part in ensuring the integrity of your network, helping you maintain backups, and providing proactive maintenance for your computers.
Your approach to hiring a consultant—and vetting them—is a multistep process that begins with understanding what you need to fill that role in the first place.
6 Tactics to Combat High-Level IT Security Threats
The number of cyber-attacks and security threats across the country and throughout the globe has gone up – but there’s an even more critical problem businesses should worry about. The complexity and threat-level of those security breaches have increased, becoming more sophisticated. It’s increasingly more common for hackers to target larger companies—oftentimes, many at once. Today’s malware tends to have many different attack vectors compared to malware five or ten years ago. This means IT security is even more integral now to the overall health and integrity of your company’s data infrastructure.
One of the most recent cyberattacks to make the headlines sent ripples out across the world as Internet usage flickered out for many large businesses and popular online services, such as Netflix, Twitter, and the Financial Times. The attack on the New Hampshire-based Internet performance management company, Dyn, was carried out as a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack that came in waves. The result was literally hundreds of thousands of devices around the world infected with malware.
Hackers are becoming emboldened, and as activity from hacktivist groups and both cyber warfare and espionage remain somewhat steady, the world of IT security has to rise to the challenge of protecting and preventing future attacks. If the DDoS on Dyne was any indication of the scope or power of hackers out there, then companies most certainly need to reevaluate their level of IT security to ensure they have something capable of handling high-level security threats such as these.
Insider Threat Rises for Data Breaches
Data breaches have been a challenge to many businesses over the past twenty years. Cyber criminals have held files for ransom, leaked personally identifiable information (PII) to third parties, and turned millions of dollars’ worth of hardware useless. The threat of being exposed to hackers has always been a fear in the minds of computer users; however, there’s a threat as insidious lurking somewhere much closer to home.
As computing moves toward cloud-based operations and accessibility improves, employees have earned a spot on the list of threats to your company’s network.
In a previous post, we discussed the consequences of unsafe browsing while at work, but the threat posed by insiders isn’t always accidental or due to negligence. Recently terminated employees or those from the past with a grudge could spell trouble for companies if the proper measures aren’t taken.