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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How social media use has blurred the line between business and pleasure and what it means for your business.
Do you know if your employees are using LinkedIn with their business email addresses?
A lot of stories focus on how to avoid risking personal reputation on social media platforms, but what does it mean for your business? I think a more important reason to make sure your team is keeping business and pleasure separate (especially when it comes to social media!) is the increased cyber threat your business faces when credentials from social media are compromised.
Nowadays, we see database leaks day in and day out. Stole records are shuffled about—sometimes sold to the highest bidder— and we’re all getting so desensitized that cybercrime has lost its urgency among us as business leaders. Granted, credential compromise is not a new topic, but often when a business’ credentials have been compromised—users often are to blame (most unsuspectingly). And social media doesn’t help matters!
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What I really want to know is, are your business network, systems, computers ALL backed up and current with patches?
This week a situation arose at a potential client site that caused a lot of trouble. Enough so that I thought I needed to tell the story to get folks aware of the real implications behind not backing your computers up.
I got a call on Monday from a business that had just been locked up by ransomware. Even though everyone had been warned ad nauseam about phishing expeditions and ransomware, warnings did not stick. If you’re like many of us, we are aware of the dangers, but don’t understand the implications of them until we get bit, stung or poked.
When it comes to risks of infections, users understand why backups are important. The problem is that they don’t realize their work isn’t getting backed up.
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