The McCully Thanksgiving left overs packed up.
With Thanksgiving this past week, I was reminded that there is really no one way to get something done. Let me start with an easy Thanksgiving example:
My contribution to Thanksgiving dinner was on the cleanup crew—I’m sure many of you were basting the turkey, preparing your famous sides or desserts, but for some of us, our biggest dinner contribution is cleaning up after dinner is done.
After dinner at this year’s feast, I was helping my mom clean up. When I started to look for Tupperware or Saran Wrap—any of the standard food storage elements, I realized none were to be found. My first instinct was to go to the store—with Black Friday now falling on Thanksgiving Day, I was confident that I could make a run to the store to find some food storage things (even if it meant waiting in a ridiculously long line with a bunch of present hoarding fanatics (no offense to any of you eager holiday shoppers, but my holiday lists are all completed online).
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Believe it or not, but Fort Knox is likely not as secure as it once was.
And neither is your business.
Why?
There are simply too many threats attacking each and every individual of your organization. And those attacks are not coming from cannons, guns or any physical force. What your team is threatened with more than any assailant or gun could ever are the massive cyberattacks that trick even those of us that consider ourselves “prepared”.
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Earlier this morning, Ruben from Google was calling to check up on my Google Adwords account. Ruben introduced himself working in California at Google and had informed me that he had been analyzing my Adwords accounts and wanted to discuss some areas of improvement.
Then and there, I assumed that Google was trying to engage their clients. To give us some customer support simply to keep us in the know about their products and how to best leverage their services to get us more raving fans.
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Do you think you are getting a deal and then end up paying premium prices for crap?
Let me start with an example.
Last weekend, I took a break from solving computer problems and decided to take a short trip to the Smokey Mountains. The leaves were starting to change, making it the perfect time to appreciate the beautiful countryside.
I decided to book a room at a hotel I was familiar with—somewhere I felt had a good reputation. When I booked my room, I found a room at a reasonably inexpensive price. The great value was going to make the weekend even better!
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I recently talked with a potential client who had gotten hacked and was looking for help. What he didn’t realize is that by not having a full time IT support team, he was actually outside of government compliance standards. Because he got help ONLY when he noticed symptoms to a problem, his networks were not backed up, patches were not maintained and virus prevention not up to date.
Why?
Because break-fix IT support doesn’t make sure all of your security t’s are crossed. They simply are paid when you really have a problem. And when you are having viruses or hacks on computers on your network, you are actually in violation of compliance!
It doesn’t matter if you’re business relies on HIPAA, PCI or FIRPA (or any other flavor of) compliance. If you’re trying to keep sensitive data safe, you need a dedicated IT team to make sure that ALL security issues are being taken care of.
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CNN has been buzzing all day on the 24 hour news cycle of cyber attacks on Dyn—a company that provides DNS services for many of America’s largest companies and biggest websites. What I wanted to discuss this week is reflect on what happened last week and inform you on how to respond—to protect your business interests from cyber attacks—both directly toward you and your interests.
But First, what the heck is DNS?
DNS stands for domain name system. Essentially, it is the phone book of the internet. For instance, when you type google.com into your browser, the google.com address you type in is actually translated into an IP address (generally having an xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx, where each ‘xxx’ is a number between 0 and 255). DNS helps us all out by letting us typing in human-readable URLs rather than strings of meaningless numbers.
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