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There are dozens of surveys and reports produced each year that evaluate digital threats and cybercrime. Not every publication applies to every business – but many of them do have some important take aways about the best practices of handling IT. Here?s few highlights from the 2017 Cyberthreat Defense Report that offer important insight for SMBs and their use of technology. Challenge – Ransomware and Responses: Approximately 61% of global businesses were impacted by ransomware in 2016 – and of those businesses who had their data held for ransom – 32.7% paid it! The majority of them found out the hard way that cyber criminals aren?t always honest about their intentions… Solution – Preventative and Patches: Ransomware, as with most malware, generally exploits a known weakness. WannaCry, a ransomware that crippled businesses throughout the world in July of 2017, exploited a weakness that had a security patch available to repair it since March of 2017. The businesses who fell victim were those who had the solution – but didn?t deploy it in time. In an ideal world, your company would have had active measures in place that prevented the ransomware attack. Proactive maintenance and security patching of your network and devices will stop the majority of cyber attacks. Challenge – Human Error from Ignorance/Training Issue: Everyone makes mistakes, including you and your employees. Even companies with top-notch internal security measures will find themselves facing malware that was accidently exposed by an employee clicking an infected email attachment. The only thing that you can do to protect your business from accidents is to take measures to prevent them. Solution – Set Policy for IT Use: Education and training is probably the most important thing a company can do to protect themselves from the digital threatscape. First, defining IT use policies will let your team know what is required from them as they?re using technology provided or maintained by your organization. ALL employees and vendors who use technology on your network should attend IT security best practice training at least annually. Posters and reminders should be used to remind everyone of the role they play in security. Of course, training and awareness will not eliminate accidents altogether – but they certainly can reduce them. Challenge – Threat from Within: As much as a business may want to believe that no one on their staff would ever do something to intentionally damage their organization, it happens often enough to be considered a serious threat. While malicious insiders make up only 11% of total attacks, they are by far the most costly and generally take the longest to resolve. Solution – Access Control: Having control over who is able to access what parts of your network won?t eliminate an internal threat, but it will significantly reduce the chances of a malicious insider attack. Access control applications afford businesses the opportunity to give specific permissions to each user. The average SMB would be surprised to learn how much more secure their network would be if employees only had access to the portions of data required for their job duties. To further protect your network, access control allows for easy onboard/offboarding to prevent ex-employees from accessing your network. Challenge – 9 out 10 Companies Can?t Find IT Security Personnel: Even businesses with an established IT department […]
We?ll discuss a few major ways how your business can take full advantage of this mobile revolution, and how you can safely and securely do so without putting your business at risk. Mobile ApplicationsMany of the services that you use on a daily basis have mobile app equivalents that can be of great value to your business. We?re talking about productivity suites like Microsoft Office 365 and Google?s G-Suite, as well as voice chat systems like Skype for Mobile and Google Hangouts–solutions that you may have been able to use on your desktop, but could never dream of using on your mobile device. As business grows more demanding, company executives are looking to get more out of their mobile device, and having near-constant access to their critical assets while out of the office is a great boon that cannot be ignored. Mobile DevicesYour workstation might be tethered to the wall outlet, but your smartphone and laptop certainly aren?t. With mobile devices on your side, you can stay productive even while out of the office by using mobile versions of the same solutions. This offers your business the flexibility to work from anywhere at any time, while also providing a productivity boost that?s often needed to stay one step ahead of deadlines. Furthermore, you give your team the ability to get their work done on their own terms, which can be empowering in its own right. The CloudSimilar to how you access mobile applications while out and about, you can use the cloud to store and access data while out of the office, among other things. You can host just about anything in the cloud, including your business?s servers, workstation infrastructure, data storage, and even applications. All you need is a connected device. After that, the rest is history. Staying SafeGoing mobile comes with certain side-effects–chief of all is the security problems associated with accessing data while out of the safety of the office. Your in-house network is secure from external threats, but hackers will use public Wi-Fi connections to steal unsecured data while it?s in transit. A Virtual Private Network (VPN) encrypts data that?s sent to and received by your device, protecting it from being spied on by any onlookers on a public network. Furthermore, you should be using a comprehensive Bring Your Own Device policy to ensure that any devices accessing sensitive information while out of the office can whitelist or blacklist applications, section off data on a per-user basis, and be capable of remotely wiping any data stored. White Mountain IT Services can equip your business with the means to take your business on the move without putting your data at risk. To learn more about VPNs or BYOD, reach out to us at (603) 889-0800.
Today, with nearly every business leaning heavily on some sort of computer-based technology, it becomes important for decision makers and business owners to analyze the performance of their tech, and of their staff. In the past, the eye test worked just fine, but today there are ways to measure the productivity and efficiency of every department of your business. It?s called business intelligence. Business intelligence (BI) refers to the practices of (as well as the technology used in) analyzing available information to help you make the best decisions for your business. In the past, business intelligence was very much as it is today, finding practices and procedures that create a better business without all the bells and whistles that contemporary BI practices provide. Every business has plenty of people that depend on it, and the better the business is run, the more it can do for those people. So while it?s easy to think of business intelligence in the 21st century as a complex process, it is just the process of doing what every successful business owner has done from the day they put out their shingle. While BI has been around for some time, modern BI is the practice of using the enormous amount of data your business creates to help you make better decisions. How does this work? Your business has loads of information stored in various places, but most of it is in databases. One stand-alone database may not help you, but if you are able to bring all of your data together in what is called a data warehouse, you can then begin to link the information. Once the information is in this repository, you can begin using state-of-the-art BI software to crawl the data and deliver reports that take this enormous amount of information and provide relatively easy-to-read reports. The best part about this BI software is that you can customize definitions to get the specificity you are looking for out of these reports. The software will return detailed analysis. So whether you run a retail store, a product manufacturer, or a high-volume restaurant, you will be able to ascertain what the best decisions are going forward. These metrics work for operations, marketing, distribution, and any part of the business that can be represented in numbers. The small business has begun to use technology in new and interesting ways; and, using it to bridge the gap between their larger competitors. Many times BI analysis can surprise even the most savvy business owner with truths about their company. BI lets business owners build efficiency through analysis, not through conjecture. This targeted and analytical approach is sure to be a huge benefit for any business that finds itself battling operational inefficiency or any number of other deficits they encounter. White Mountain IT Services wants to provide our clients with the information they need to build a more efficient business. We offer small and medium-sized businesses comprehensive IT support and other proactive IT services that are designed to eliminate downtime and build overall efficiency. Call us at (603) 889-0800 today to see how our professional technicians can help your business be more efficient.
With Adobe ending support for Flash by 2020, many web browsing tools have begun to shift away from using Flash as their default media player. For example, Google Chrome has made the jump to HTML5 for the most part. The problem with this is that there are still quite a few websites and other online tools still use this technology. In the event that you want to enable it on a case-by-case business, here?s how to do so. It?s important to remember, however, that the reason why Flash is being phased out is that it has compatibility and security issues. In any case, you?ll want to keep it disabled most of the time. Before you make any changes, make sure that you take a look at your current Flash settings in Chrome. To check these, go to a new browser tab and type chrome://flags into the search bar. You?re looking for a pair of settings that need to be changed to Allow rather than Default. These are Prefer HTML over Flash and Run all flash content when Flash setting is set to ?allow.? The next step is to open another Chrome tab and enter chrome://components into the search bar. You need to find the Adobe Flash Player section, where you will click the Check for Update button. Next, open up Chrome?s settings. Go to the bottom of the page and view Show Advanced Settings. Go even further and you?ll see the option for Content Settings in the Privacy tab. When the box opens, scroll down to the Flash option. Check the selection for Ask first before allowing sites to run Flash (recommended). You can also block Flash in your browser completely by checking the box for Block sites using Flash. This is generally a better option, as allowing sites to run Flash unchecked is a security problem. If you want to allow specific sites to use Flash without being blocked, you can do that too. You can Manage exceptions, which are found in the Content Settings. Find Flash, then enter the URL of the website for the exception. Then, select Allow in the Behavior column. You can even use a shortcut to do this same function. Just click in the leftmost end of the address bar and, under Flash, select Always allow on this site. For more great tips and tricks, be sure to subscribe to our blog.
However, many small and medium-sized businesses were also victimized by ransomware attacks, often under the mistaken impression that they were too small to be considered worthwhile targets by the perpetrators. Unfortunately for many of these small businesses, this impression ends up costing them big when ransomware strikes. Ransomware works by encrypting the data stored on a device, demanding that the victim pay a sum in cryptocurrency for their files to be decrypted. This is usually paired with a time-sensitive threat to delete the data if the ransom isn?t paid post-haste. When attacking large corporations, cybercriminals go for the gold, trying to extort as much as they can from their victim. With small businesses, on the other hand, they take advantage of the common inability many have to afford the solutions that would protect them against such attacks, and ask for a smaller ransom. Considering the relatively high costs many solutions have for a small business, combined with these smaller, more ?reasonable? ransoms–plus how much damage even the smallest amount of downtime can cause these businesses–it should come as no surprise that many small businesses see themselves as having no choice but to pay up. This is problematic for a few reasons. First, paying the ransom inherently requires entrusting the ones who attacked you to remain true to their word and actually unlock your systems once the funds have changed hands. Are you willing to assume that your attacker is a trustworthy person after they?ve threatened your business? Second, consider what effect a successful heist against an SMB would have on the cyber criminal. They would naturally be inclined to target more SMBs, possibly returning again to those who proved willing to pay up with a new attack. Think about it–which would you choose: a possible large payday, or a lot of almost-guaranteed smaller payoffs that quickly add up? Regardless, it is always better to avoid paying the demanded ransom and to instead rely on proactive measures, such as an off-site (or ideally cloud-based) data backup solution that you can restore your systems with that has been kept safely away from the ransomware. You also need to make sure your staff is well-versed in recognizing ransomware attacks in order to better avoid them, and what to do and who to contact if their workstation contracts one. If your SMB needs help protecting itself against the threat of ransomware, reach out to White Mountain IT Services for assistance. We can advise you on best practices to keep ransomware out of your systems. Give us a call at (603) 889-0800 to get started.
