Buckeye IT blog

Let’s take a look at a real-world scenario that I ran into a few weeks ago with a family friend. For the sake of this story, let’s call him Bob. Bob lost access to a pretty important online account.

Cybercriminals aren’t exactly holding back when it comes to attacking businesses, which means that businesses can’t rest on their haunches as the new year rolls in. Let’s take a few moments to look toward the near future, and the issues that cybersecurity professionals are warning us about.

While the major holiday shopping days have passed us by, many people are still looking for that perfect gift often using the Internet to find it. While online shopping is certainly more convenient, it can also be dangerous. To help keep you safe this season and beyond, we’re reviewing a few practices to protect your identity while shopping online.

Trend Micro, the developer of the popular antivirus program, has attracted some unwanted attention after a former employee managed to steal customer data and sell it to scammers. These scammers then use this data to call Trend Micro customers. If you use Trend Micro’s antivirus solutions, you’re going to want to pay close attention to any calls you get.

It can be easy to slack off when it comes to good password practices. Many users still use the same password across multiple sites and often don’t use secure passwords. Password managers make this a lot easier, but it’s really two-factor authentication (2FA) that can make all the difference. Strong, unique passwords are still important (not all accounts offer two-factor authentication) but let’s talk about why you should always enable two-factor or multifactor on all of your accounts when possible.

In many ways, explaining why sufficient cybersecurity is important for your business has become redundant - especially when it is much more important to understand how this cybersecurity needs to protect you. The threats to data and privacy are known, but no less potent. In order to counter them, you need to make sure you have what you need to protect your business - starting with a few key considerations.

Every IT administrator today needs to be concerned about cybersecurity, as does every private business when it comes to its network. However, the same can’t really be said for the computing resources of the government and other public entities… simply due to the lack of talent available.

There are hundreds of things that a business owner has to do, so managing the security of the data coming in and going out from mobile devices might not make the hierarchy of considerations that need to be immediately addressed. Today, we will take a look at why paying attention to the mobile end of your business is so important, how Mobile Information Management (MIM) helps with that, and how MIM fits in with the rest of your mobile strategy. 

Common opinion more or less states that passwords aren’t so much “necessary,” as they are a “necessary evil.” The best practices that are recommended to maintain the efficacy of passwords today can certainly feel excessive - which tempts many users into ignoring these practices, to the detriment of their security. Fortunately, many large companies - like Google - are trying to make passwords easier to manage.

Do you have a smartphone? Do you feel as though your data is secure on it? Users are relying on smartphones more and more to accomplish daily tasks. This means there is a massive amount of data traffic each day transferred to and from your device, and potentially transferred into the hands of a cybercriminal. 

Let’s face it, cybersecurity now has to be a major point of emphasis for the modern business. With the immense amount of threats out there, cybersecurity it has grown into a multi-billion dollar a year industry, with no limit in sight. Just a few decades ago, there was no fileless malware, no ransomware, no botnet army lying in wait to DDoS corporate data centers into oblivion. Today, we take a look at the brief (albeit rapidly growing) history of cybersecurity. 

As the quantity of Wi-Fi compatible devices increases, the demand for wirelessly-transmitted networks follow. While wired connections might seem inferior, Wi-Fi’s accessibility brings a new challenge -- security.

Let’s run through a quick scenario: your company’s computing infrastructure is infected with ransomware. Fortunately, you have an offsite backup, so you are able to restore your systems without too much trouble, other than the time you’ve lost. As you investigate the root cause, you discover that one of your employees allowed the ransomware in by falling for a phishing email. So, do you fire them?

You’d be hard-pressed to find someone nowadays who hasn’t heard of malware, although they may have difficulty identifying different threats as they encounter them. Does this sound like the people that you work with? We’re here with a simple solution to assist you and your team in spotting the different kinds of threats - a malware guide to distribute among your staff so they can better spot the usual suspects.

Imagine a scenario where your password has been stolen by a hacker. Now your accounts are completely at the mercy of them. What do you do? Obviously you want to change the password, but are you going to learn from this mistake or let it happen again in the future? Thankfully, two-factor authentication offers a solution to this dilemma, and it’s one that you might not have considered in the past.

How often does your business have employees traveling to conferences or working remotely due to circumstances or physical location? With technology improving at a rapid pace, these opportunities are more possible now than they ever were in the past, and depending on the solution implemented, they are far more efficient, too. Of course, one thing that will never change is the need to keep company data secure, no matter what type of Internet connection is being utilized.

Social media has overtaken both the professional and personal aspects of online communication and connection, and while it might provide a considerable boon for both, it increases the odds of being contacted by scams and other malicious attempts. The best way to make sure you don’t fall prey to a scam is to remain vigilant. Today we’ll discuss the various scams that are created for use with social media.

What has proven to be one of the more effective ways of preventing phishing attacks may be under fire from more advanced threats designed specifically to penetrate the defenses of two-factor authentication. This means that users need to be more cognizant of avoiding these attacks, but how can you help them make educated decisions about this? Let’s start by discussing the phishing attacks that can beat 2FA.

Earlier this week, you may have seen the first part of this article, where we discussed how robocallers collect your information. Today, we continue our discussion on data privacy and what you can do to keep your organization and personal data safe.

Protecting your business’ data is no simple task. To make it as secure as possible, you’ll have to understand how personal data flows through online channels. We’re digging pretty deep with this one, so get ready for an informative and, if nothing else, interesting read. This topic is especially important in an age where Facebook and Google exist, but there are countless other threats to data privacy out there that we all experience on a regular basis--business or not.