Worksmart IT Services
For years, you’ve used strong passwords to protect your data. Your IT team even set up policies to prevent the use of weak passwords like “password123”. This method of authenticating, or verifying your employees’ identities, kept the bad guys out.
By now, you know how important cybersecurity tools are as part of your IT plan. And you know that even with many layers of security, a hacker may still find a way in to your network. In fact, hackers often assume small organizations are not as careful as large corporations, so they see businesses like yours as easy targets. On top of that, most organizations don’t find out about a security breach for over a month. If that’s not good enough for your organization, you need to know about WorkSmart’s Security Operations Center (SOC) service.
When most folks think about cybersecurity, they think about the tools—firewalls, anti-virus software, web filtering, etc. That’s smart. We always recommend a multi-layered approach to security.
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?
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:
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.
It’s an unfortunately common scenario—someone has downloaded and executed CryptoLocker, and now, half of the company’s data is encrypted. The backups are not working, and the CEO is contemplating paying the $40,000 it’s going to take to get the password to unencrypt the data. Now seems like a good time for the world’s most epic facepalm.
With all the recent hacking scares all over the world, you know and understand that your cyber security and your business’s cyber security are extremely important. However, when it comes to authentication processes, you may not be sure what the real deal is. There are two seemingly similar types of authentication that are often confused. Those are, of course, two-step and two-factor authentication. Find out more about the differences between the two here to ensure your cyber security will always be top of the line.
