Worksmart IT ServicesBlog
You’ve set up your organization’s cybersecurity—considering firewall, anti-virus, DNS and web filtering, your wireless network… and on and on. You’ve made all the difficult IT security decisions to protect your business, but just one well-meaning employee that clicks one malicious link in one little email can open the door for a hacker to defeat all your defenses.
Let’s start by clearing the air: It’s normal to have a love-hate relationship with passwords. It’s hard not to love the very things that keep your information safe, ensure private conversations are kept private, and give you peace of mind to go about your business.
We’re all accustomed to hopping on wireless networks whenever we can—saving data use on our mobile devices. And we appreciate when the office or coffee shop or school makes it easy for us to connect any time we visit. For most organizations, offering guest Wi-Fi access is a must. But is having a simple password enough to keep company data safe?
You may have heard about the Spectre and Meltdown security vulnerabilities recently. While there’s no evidence of anyone exploiting the security flaw, we want to make sure our clients are aware of how it’s being resolved.
Forbes just released a compilation of 60 cybersecurity predictions for 2018. While no one can predict the future, we’re sure that cybersecurity is going to stay in the headlines and at the top of our list. We’ve curated the predictions most likely to interest or impact our clients’ organizations here:
NBC News recently shared this report about schools in Columbia Falls, Montana that were targets of a cyberattack. Hackers accessed students personal data—social security numbers, phone numbers—and threatened to release that data and hurt children unless a ransom was paid. The hackers also accessed school security cameras and could watch everything going on. This school district lies in a quiet town at the foot of Glacier National Park, showing that threats can affect any organization, anywhere.
Get ready for a big update from Microsoft for Windows 10
A good reminder from our partner, KnowBe4, on USB sticks (aka thumb drives). We’ve stopped giving out branded USB sticks at events to make sure we don’t encourage folks to plug in an unknown drive. If you find one, be sure to give it to an IT professional (like your friendly WorkSmart consultant) so he or she can test it safely off the network.
Did you know that WorkSmart manages the IT solutions of almost 400 companies and just about 11k end users? And, every year we grow a little bit more – enough to land us on the INC 5000 list for the past 10 years straight.
Cyber-security is getting tougher every day. Hackers are smarter. Technology is advancing faster. And the losses businesses experience as a result of cyber-crime are astronomical. A quick Google search shows that the cost of cyber-attacks in 2015 was estimated at $400 billion, and ransomware alone cost businesses $209 million in just the first 3 months of 2016. That’s bananas.
