It’s hard to know who to trust nowadays. And what’s harder, is understanding the consequences of trusting the wrong person. As we are entering the holiday season, I thought it fit to alert you to a few common schemes and scams that cyber criminals use especially during the holidays. Here are six common scams that can compromise your business during the holiday season.
- Ad Poisoning—cybercriminals continue to fool ad agencies that they are legitimate advertisers. Criminals poison the ad pool by linking to nefarious websites that then can easily install malware and viruses on your network. This is a common delivery system ransomware viruses, like CryptoWall.
Solution—Here are a few things I recommend you doing to help keep the bad guys out of your holiday cyber shopping:
Disable Adobe Flash on your computer—or if you are a video fiend, set the Adobe Flash plugin to “click-to-play” mode to block automatic infections.
Keep up-to-date with all security on your operating system.
Download and install an Ad Blocker that blocks pop-ups from displaying in your blocker automatically.
If you have a network and are worried about vulnerabilities from team members, you can get rid of Flash altogether or deploy blockers using a group policy.
CryptoWall 4.0 is now the latest version of malicious ransomware that will encrypt your files and hold them hostage. This new strain of virus is ‘bigger and badder’ than the last ones. It not only encrypts your files, but also your file names. If you attempt decryption, you have no idea where to start or what is most important!
CryptoWall continues to use similar versions of emails it had used in the past. Some recent emails include attached resumes, invoices, shipping information and payments. If you notice emails of this variety passing through your inbox (and don’t expect them), please do NOT open them! Avoid clicking on links from emails or attachments. These emails may even appear to be from people you know! Before you click on something that you hadn’t expected, verify that it is something you can safely open.
If you fall victim to this ransomware, we have few solutions to get your data back- and we cannot guarantee that paying a ransom will actually restore your files to their previous state—we can’t trust these criminals!
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I just got an email notifying me that my password will expire in 7 days! Time to reinvent the wheel and come up with another super secure passcode? Why torture yourself with password trauma? Here are my 5 easy tips to a better password!
Instead of banging your head on your table or coming up with a complicated password that will be hard for you to remember, I decided to outline how I like to generate my passwords. Disclaimer: Please don’t use the example passwords for your logins. They aren’t secure! Please do use my tricks to help you generate even better ones!
Tip 1: Turn your password into a sentence. Use at least one proper noun within the sentence to make it a little complicated and end with punctuation. Take the first letters of each word and punctuation for your password. Here’s an example:
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Most people, including me, think of Section 179 as some mysterious or complicated piece of tax code. The bottom line is that it is important that you understand what this specific code means for your business because you may be missing out on big deductions.
In this post, I’ll walk through Section 179 in plain English and explain how your investment in computer equipment might be the perfect way of you to take advantage of this deduction.
First, what the heck is the Section 179 Deduction?
Section 179 of the IRS tax code lets businesses deduct full purchase price of qualifying equipment—which includes computers and software— purchased during the tax year. What this means is when your business buys qualified equipment or software, they can deduct the FULL PURCHASE PRICE from your gross income. The logic behind why Section 179 exists? To encourage businesses to buy equipment and invest in their businesses.
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Have you ever had to collaborate with clients when progress was delayed because someone either didn’t get an email or didn’t get back soon enough? While email, file sharing and conference calls may be very familiar and comfortable, there are actually much more effective ways to engage team collaboration that are safer and more efficient than many conventional methods—email, VPN (Virtual Private Network) or Dropbox (just to name a few).
Indeed, cloud technologies and collaboration are a match made in cyber-heaven. Here, I outline how you could be working with cloud collaboration rather than your normal routine: huddled around a desktop PC in someone’s cubicle, shuffling documents between offices, back and forth phone and emails (choose your own misadventure) that undermine yours and your employees’ productivity.
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For years now, people have been talking about how high-functioning computers would take over the world—a SciFi thriller where tries to fight back against masses of robotic armies, machines trying to eliminate human existence. The notion of a completely automated society and workplace certainly seemed far-fetched 10 or 15 years ago and, in my opinion is still rather off-the-wall. When news anchors and columnists refer to automated computers taking over our jobs, they are sensationalizing the idea that computer automation will devalue human employment. On the contrary, I argue that process automation does quite the opposite—automation eliminates non-value-added work in order to highlight one’s particularly valuable and important human skills. Skills that would be exceedingly hard to replace by machines.
The specific value businesses get out of automated processes is not just in efficiency. It also goes beyond cost-savings. Rather, the tangible value that automation gives to a business is in increasing the perceived value of their workforce. Automation is meant to reduce employees’ time spent on simple tasks while increasing their time engaged in higher order thinking.
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