Business Solutions & Software Group Blog

Unfortunately, this season’s holiday is going to be much like the rest of 2020: risky. With many people taking the necessary precautions to not contract or spread the coronavirus, a lot of people are doing most of their shopping online. By distancing from others and using the Internet to do the lion’s share of your holiday shopping, you take on different risks. Let’s go through some of them today.

Cyberattacks continue to be a major problem as scammers send out billions of phishing messages a day. While it doesn’t really sound that nefarious it can be a major problem for a lot of people. One version of phishing, the absurdly labeled smishing, is gaining traction and presents another avenue of attack for hackers. 

From individuals all the way up to companies and governments, ransomware has been causing no small amount of stress for some years now. Let’s take a few moments to discuss this threat, what you can do about it, and how seriously the government is taking ransomware.

Software giant Adobe will cease support of Flash Player and the 24-year-old software will retire at the end of the year, according to the company. This is a pretty big deal, and the loss is one that will be felt by many businesses. Or will it?

Business success is often tied to the quality of your business relationships, and there are many people you need to trust: suppliers who can provide you with everything you need, the team who do their jobs, and customers who turn to you because they know they need you. Unfortunately, it is possible for cybercriminals to exploit this trust to achieve their own goals.

This year, the main focus for business owners has been how to conduct business with a global COVID-19 pandemic. The public health crisis has created opportunities for scammers and hackers, and they’ve responded. One could say that there is a flourishing cybercrime pandemic as the past twelve months has seen a 50 percent increase in lost revenue over the second-highest period on record. Let’s take a look at COVID-19-era cybercrime and how it’s just getting worse as the pandemic rages on.

Zoom is a video conferencing application that, as the coronavirus pandemic reared its ugly head, saw a considerable leap in popularity amongst organizations of every kind as well as private users. However, this leap also helped bring some serious security issues with the platform to light. Let’s check in and see how Zoom has since worked to improve their user protections.

“To confirm you’re a human being, select all of the images that include traffic signals.”

Chances are good that you’ve seen such a requirement before as you’ve spent time online, whether you were filling out a form or logging into a website. Whether it was an evaluation like the one above, or simply one where you needed to identify a highly distorted series of alphanumeric characters, you probably have also noticed these tests getting more difficult as time has passed. The reason for this is simple: computers are getting better at beating them.

Wouldn’t it be nice to know how much risk your business was under, in terms of vulnerabilities and potential exploits? Believe it or not, this is entirely possible, through a process known as penetration testing. Commonly referred to as “pen testing,” this simple measure can provide a business with some very valuable insight into their security preparations.

There are a lot of cyberthreats out there… too many for the modern business to avoid them all. While employing best practices may greatly reduce your chances of being breached and having data stolen from your network, they can also help you determine how a breach occurred and how your data was stolen. While there is no such thing as perfect cybersecurity, there are a few strategies you can lean on to strengthen yours.

Smart assistants are one of the most intriguing and confounding technologies developed over the past decade. At the time of this writing, over 150 million smart speakers are in 60 million homes in the United States, when you add in the smart assistants available on mobile devices and other various smart devices, you’re talking a billion people actively using some type of smart assistant. Over the past couple of years, you’re beginning to see these assistants being used more for business and this has made certain security-minded people a little weary of them. Let’s take a look at some of the security questions surrounding the smart assistants.

For the past twenty years, the password has been the most important security tool that individuals and businesses have to keep outside parties out of their personal and professional information. This may not always be the case, but much of a business’ security is built around the idea that passwords are keeping unwanted entities out. It is important that you and your staff understand what good password hygiene looks like. Today, we’ll outline what it looks like.

As a consumer, how concerned are you about the care that businesses give to your data privacy. Very? You aren’t the only one. 87 percent of Americans see their data privacy as a human right.

With COVID-19 creating the challenges that it has for so many, there is little wonder that creating a vaccine is such a major focus. Unfortunately, hackers are aware of this focus, and how it makes the organizations conducting vaccine trials particularly vulnerable. Let’s examine this situation, and the lessons that all businesses can take away from it.

The COVID-19 pandemic has changed the way that a lot of businesses are approaching cybersecurity. In normal times, businesses will periodically try to make improvements to their organizational security and pounce all over events that could put their network and data at risk. While this strategy has worked, the new normal brought on by COVID-19 has IT administrators and business decision makers focused on maintaining resilience regardless of the financial and operational stressors they encounter. In today’s article we will look to identify the major shifts businesses have had to make, and how a consistent approach to cybersecurity is giving some companies an advantage.

One of the most prevalent problems that businesses now face are scams known as phishing attacks. When it comes to defending against these attacks, the capability to identify phishing as such is perhaps your greatest asset. Let’s go over a few signs that a message you receive might be a phishing attack.

In a recent security update, most Android and iOS phones received a new opt-in setting related to the COVID-19 Exposure Notification system. What is this? Is your phone being tracked? Let’s take a deeper look at what is going on.

It’s a common myth that Apple computers don’t get viruses. It’s not uncommon for a Mac user to chime in and say, “you should have gotten a Mac,” when a PC user mentions getting a virus or malware. 

Let’s unpack this myth, and talk a little about how, no matter what technology you have, you need to protect it.

There are many security buzzwords that come into play when the technology available to help secure a business is discussed. The problem is that many of these buzzwords sound great but are actually very poor fits to the real needs of most small and medium-sized businesses. Let’s consider how these buzzwords play into the concept of “security theater” and how this can impact businesses negatively.

The days of the cash-only business are over. It doesn’t matter if your business is a multinational corporation or you cut grass for a living, accepting payment cards is not only convenient for your customers, most of the time it’s the most secure way to get paid. In an effort to protect the personal and financial information of consumers who have come to depend on their payment cards, the banks that back the credit card industry have developed a regulation that businesses who process cards need to adhere to. Today, we will go over this regulation and how it affects small and medium-sized businesses.