However, do you know what else is in the palm of your hand? Passwords, credit card information and personal information. Being sure your smartphone is protected is entirely dependent on how you are using it. Today, we will go over tips to ensure you, your friends, and your business are not going to fall victim to a mobile device threat. Lock Your Device While this might seem like an obvious statement, you need to lock your device. A large amount of smartphone users don?t have password protection, which makes them an easy target. Sure, your friends might take ridiculous pictures if you leave it unlocked; but what would a cybercriminal do? Passcodes are an excellent first step to securing your device. Modern devices now let you skip the task of entering a passcode, utilizing fingerprint scanners as well as facial recognition technology.  Wireless Connection Susceptibility  Everything is going or has gone wireless. If there is currently a cord attached to it, you better believe someone is working towards removing it yet maintaining device functionality. Wireless headsets, internet, chargers, mice, keyboards — all without a cord. While it may be more convenient for you, it is also much more convenient for criminals. You wouldn?t leave your removable hard drive laying around with a USB cord in it, waiting to be plugged in somewhere unbeknownst to you. So, why leave your smartphone able to be connected via Bluetooth, NFC communications, or even Wi-Fi? Deactivating these device capabilities greatly reduces your chance of being targeted.  Update Required Notice when there is an update for your device — it says update required. Not update advised, or optional? but required. The main reason these updates or patches are released is to stay ahead of cybercriminal activity. By the time a cybercriminal is able to scheme a way to infiltrate your device, phone providers already have negated their progress with an update.  Neglecting to update your device in a timely manner greatly increases vulnerability.  Limit Application Permissions There has probably been a time when you have downloaded an application, and granted that application permissions. While some of us might not even look at what we are agreeing to, others can?t help but notice the vast amount of access an application such as a flashlight or a game requires. Why does a flashlight app need my contact list, or access to my microphone? Applications tend to request further permissions than they actually need to target you. They often sell this information to advertisers, and target you with your favorite brands. Learning who you are is important for these advertisers. So, unless you enjoy being spammed with ads, sometimes it is best to delete that old app you don?t use anymore.  Use Caution When Opening Attachments Messaging applications are no different than email. If something looks suspicious, don?t open it! Attachments are often used to deliver mischievous programs to a victim. Keeping the same best practice mindset when using your smartphone as you normally would when navigating emails will greatly reduce your risk of falling victim. Following these simple tips will help keep your smartphone secure. If you would like more information on how to defend yourself and in turn, your business; reach out to the experts at White Mountain IT Services. Give us a call at (603) 889-0800 today.

What?s the Status of Today?s Cybersecurity Industry? At the time of this writing, cybercrime certainly does pay? it takes in at least $1.5 trillion in profits per year, and that number is still growing. Some projections anticipate it causing $6 trillion in yearly damages by the time 2021 rolls around. The cybercrime industry is worth $200 billion per year, and there?s been a 67 percent increase in security breaches over the span of the last five years. Phishing has grown in popularity to reach the top spot, targeting approximately 76 percent of all businesses. Phishing is a multi-purpose attack vector for cybercriminals, delivering ransomware or other types of malware, tricking the target into handing over sensitive data, or stealing credentials that allow them to access your data at their leisure. Making it an even worse threat, many who have been phished successfully don?t realize it until the ramifications set in. These attacks are responsible for the exposure, theft, or corruption of billions of records annually. It should be pretty clear at this point why businesses need to be concerned about cybercrime. However, cybercrime wasn?t always as huge of an issue as it is now. Cybercrime?s Origins Believe it or not, the global threat that costs economies trillions each year was once a simple research project. An individual named Bob Thomas realized that a computer program could potentially be able to travel across a computer network, leaving a trail behind. He designed a computer code that he nicknamed ?Creeper.? The aptly named Creeper was meant to traverse the ARPANET, moving from Tenex terminal to Tenex terminal, carrying its message: ?I?M THE CREEPER : CATCH ME IF YOU CAN? When Ray Tomlinson – the inventor of email – took notice of it, he created what was effectively the first-ever computer worm. He then wrote another code, named ?Reaper,? which hunted down Creeper and deleted it – effectively inventing antivirus. Leveraged By Criminals Cybercrime was once much different than what can be observed today. In the 1980s, Soviet hackers considered the benign applications that academics had designed, and speculated the same concept could be used to infiltrate other networks. By 1986, a German hacker named Marcus Hess successfully hacked into an Internet gateway that the University of California at Berkeley hosted. With this connection, he had reached the ARPANET. He ended up hacking a total of 400 computers, including some Pentagon mainframes, and planned to sell the secrets he had absconded with to the Soviet Committee for State Security, which translates to Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti… otherwise known as the KGB. Through cooperation between the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the government of West Germany, Hess was caught, and became the first to be convicted of a cybercrime. He was handed down a 20-month suspended sentence. This just so happened to coincide with an increase in both connectivity and the severity of viruses, making the threat that a virus could pose much more considerable. Cybersecurity Software?s Development In 1988, software engineer Robert Morris tried to measure the Internet, but it didn?t exactly work out that way. His plan was to write a program that would spread to different networks, infiltrating Unix terminals, and replicate itself. The problem is, the ?replication? aspect was so efficient, it slowed down the entire Internet and had serious ramifications. […]

Communication & Collaboration Solutions Remote workers would be useless without the ability to communicate with them. What good is an employee working on a task if they are not able to send what they are working on to you? Maintaining open lines of communication between you and your employees is crucial in maintaining an effective remote workforce. Employees should be utilizing tools such as email, chat platforms, video conferencing, and VoIP.  Employees also should have collaboration solutions within reach. Employees who are able to share files or work ?side-by-side? despite being hundreds if not thousands of miles apart, will benefit your business greater than an employee who is unable to collaborate with his team.  Project Management Tools Direction is important with any project. Keeping your staff up to speed and pointing them in the right direction doesn?t have to be difficult just because they are a remote worker. In fact, if utilizing a chat platform, employees often are able to stay on task more effectively. When a project manager requests an objective to be completed, employees can use their message as a checklist. Looming deadlines, along with a fluid schedule are triggers to work-related stress. Utilizing a reliable project management solution can make remote workers feel as though they are on a team, all working towards business success.  Cybersecurity If protecting your business from cyberattacks is important to you, then your remote workers should be well equipped before they access even a byte of data. Remote workers should be utilizing multi-factor authentication measures, and all software needs to be, and remain, up-to-date. A password management system would be classified as cybersecurity, especially when remote access is involved. These systems help prevent your data from getting into the wrong hands. Time-Tracking Software An important part of remote work is time entries. Without them, it is difficult to tell if your employees are actively doing their job. Let?s take a look at a hypothetical situation from a careless business owner. Billy, founder of Uncomfortable Chairs Inc. hired a remote employee to do his accounting. The employee promised productivity and efficiency but hasn?t been delivering. One day Billy decides to remotely access his station to examine what is going on. It turns out that his employee goes idle for hours at a time, regularly. This would have been easily noticed with reliable time-tracking software. Implementing time-tracking software can simplify tasks such as payroll, allowing you to spend the saved time on other business matters.  White Mountain IT Services has experts who can help your business simplify remote work technologies, as well as make your remote practices much more secure. To learn more, reach out to us at (603) 889-0800!

Habits to Help You Foil Phishing Attacks Fortunately, once you and your staff have developed the following habits, the likelihood of a phishing attack fooling one of you diminishes greatly? but not entirely. Attackers are always coming up with clever and new ways to pull the wool over their targets? eyes, and there?s always the chance that you or one of your team members could miss one of the warning signs. This is precisely why it is so important to turn the following activities into learned, automatic behaviors. Check Links Before You Click Them Links are a wonderfully convenient thing, when you think about it – all you have to do to go to the website you want to visit is click on the right link. However, cybercriminals will put wrong links into their messages (often disguising them) in an attempt to take advantage of this tendency. You need to get into the habit of taking a moment before clicking through any link you see and simply hovering your cursor over it. This will display the URL the link directs you to, giving you the chance to confirm that the link is legitimate before clicking through. Know How to Spot Fraudulent Links  Speaking of whether or not a link is legitimate, there are a few warning signs that hackers are counting on you to miss. Let?s assume that you receive an email that appears to come from Amazon, offering some really impressive deals on some furnishings that your business could use, or some basic office supplies that always seem to be running low. The important thing is, it is something that definitely interests you? but is it actually coming from Amazon? As we said above, the URL can help you determine whether or not the message is legitimate. Where in the URL does the last ?dot? (as in, ?dot-com?) appear? In a legitimate URL, the last dot would be the last one in the domain.  [amazon.com/deals/offers] – As the last dot is the one in ?dot-com,? this link should be safe to click through. [amazon.com.deals/offers] – This URL should not be clicked on, as there is an additional dot after the domain. Check the Sender Who does the email actually come from? Sure, it might look like any other email from Amazon, or eBay, or PayPal, or whatever the case may be, but a skilled fraudster could have replicated their design with little trouble. What would be more difficult for them to do would be to hide the email address that displays in the header. Pay close attention, as these attackers have had to become really clever with how they disguise their trickery. Sometimes they?ll omit letters, so the URL still looks close enough to the real one to pass the ?quick glance? task. Quickly skim through this list: amazon.com google.com ebay.com payal.com reddit.com visa.com Did you catch the fake? If you didn?t, look again more carefully. Since our brains are expecting certain letters to be there, we can subconsciously insert them into what we?re reading.  Similarly, we can still read words that are scrambled up, so long as all the right letters are still there and the first and last ones are in place. In fact, that list could just have easily included the URL for ?papyal.com,? or some […]

Payment Skimming The fact that your credit card quickly and conveniently withdraws money from an account and transfers it in exchange for consumer goods is often overlooked. Most people in fact, don?t even bother verifying their account and the transaction that went through. This is an easily targetable characteristic associated with your average card-user. The way these users are typically targeted is through skimming.  Payment skimming is the act of discretely acquiring credit card information. What an attacker chooses to do with this acquired information is up to them. However, due to the lack of attention to detail and also fraud detection on high cost purchases, most attackers will withdraw small, unnoticeable amounts of money from a large amount of victims, rather than one lump sum of change. So how do they do this? Attackers will often add their own, home-made skimming device to a location where debit or credit cards are swiped. Every time a card is swiped, the skimmer collects information and adds it to the criminal?s to-do list. The criminal can do a number of things with this information, from producing a phony card which they can swipe wherever, or just making a fraudulent purchase. Your credit card information could even be sold on the Dark Web.  These skimming devices can be found on gas pumps, ATMs, or even made to be mobile. Here are a few tips on how to recognize if a skimmer is in place. Combatting Skimmers There are a few different means of protecting yourself from skimming attacks. Many of them are put in place by the card provider themselves. Many cards are equipped with computer chips to contain data, rather than a magnetic strip. This is a much more secure option. In 2015, a new law was determined: if a store decides against utilizing this more secure chip payment method, they themselves would be liable for the fraud that took place. This ruling convinced most business owners to update their POS infrastructure. Assuming your ATM transactions are safe isn?t wise. While you might think that these sorts of attacks don?t happen in your area, this ideology is foolish. Here are a few things you can do to reduce your risk of being a victim to a skimming attack. Where You Swipe is Important Before you decide to swipe your payment card, consider your environment. ATMs in the corner of a gas station are a lot easier for a criminal to attach a skimming device to. An ATM in a bank is in a much more secure, well monitored location. Plus, you won?t have to pay those outrageous ATM fees if you are using your own bank. Payment Has Gone Touchless Paying for consumer goods has gone touchless. You can use a mobile app, or another touchless payment option. This ensures that your magnetic strip on your card never comes in contact with a potential skimming device. Keep Your Card Another simple way to keep your cards secure, is by keeping a close eye on them. This doesn?t have to mean following your waitress up to her POS system and monitoring the transaction. It means do your best to avoid situations where a merchant needs to take your card away, out of sight. They could easily swipe your card in their skimming device […]