MSPNetworks Blog

Unfortunately, cybersecurity is a lot easier to reinforce in the office than it is when your team members are working remotely—and even then, it can be a serious challenge to maintain. However, let’s focus on the remote worker’s situation for a few moments and review a few best practices that can help a remote worker stay secure.

Best Practice: Provide Them with the Tools to Stay Secure

When your team members are working outside of the office, they aren’t going to be protected by the security you’ve implemented into your business network—not without a few specialized tools in place. This is why your remote workers should have fully up-to-date antivirus solutions and virtual private networking (VPN) connections in place.

A VPN in particular is a great tool for a remote worker, as it allows them to access your business’ network from elsewhere without revealing their traffic and data to snooping eyes.

Best Practice: Emphasize Password Security Even More

Spend enough time with us, and you’ll likely be able to recite the advice that we repeatedly share regarding passwords—never writing them down, using a different password for every account, creating passwords (or ideally, passphrases) that will hold up to attempts to crack them, and many more tidbits. Remote employees need to be held to the same standards, and then some.

With your team members acting outside of your office, they aren’t sitting in an environment that actively reminds them to maintain their security standards in general, meaning that their password practices are apt to suffer. Working to keep these standards top of mind will be important for you to prioritize.

Best Practice: Reinforce Physical Protections

Cybersecurity practices go beyond password resilience and antivirus protections—you also need to consider your actual technology and the physical protections you have defending it. Keeping unexamined peripheral devices away from your work hardware, keeping your work hardware secured, and generally keeping it reserved exclusively for your work-related use are essential parts to your overall security posture.

Of course, this is just the tip of the iceberg—there’s a lot more that can and should be done to ensure your remote workers aren’t undermining your business’ cybersecurity. Learn more by reaching out to us at (516) 403-9001.

Your network security is of the utmost importance to your business for numerous, hopefully obvious reasons. However, there are a few errors that are easy enough to make that could easily be the proverbial monkey wrench in the works. Let’s go over what these network security faux pas look like, so you can resolve them more effectively (and don’t worry, we’ll discuss that, too).

So, let’s dive right into the mistakes you need to identify in your business—if they should be present—so that they can be fixed.

Not Preparing For (or Denying Outright) Threats

“But it doesn’t happen to businesses like mine,” is one of the most lethal opinions you could possibly have in terms of your preparedness against threats of all kinds. This is primarily because (spoiler alert) these kinds of attacks do, in fact, happen to businesses like yours.

They happen to all businesses—it really comes down to how well prepared you are to resist the efforts of such attacks. This will require some forethought to first generate a list of risk factors your business is apt to face and establish the means to minimize them. Between phishing and other forms of social engineering, pure cyberattacks, and the litany of other attack methods that modern cybercriminals employ—often using automation—the threats to all businesses are very, very real.

Neglecting Maintenance and Upgrades

Let’s say that you do accept that you’re at risk of cyberattacks. That’s a great start, but if you don’t keep up with your IT’s needs and allow your business’ technology to fall into disrepair, you’ll also accept that you’re going to be breached. You need to keep up with your upkeep, ensuring your technology and its defenses are all in proper working order and that you promptly install any upgrades that apply to your solutions.

Failing to Educate Employees on Security Processes

Look, I understand the impulse to want to trust your team members to make good decisions, but there’s a difference between trust and shortsightedness. While you should feel that you can trust your team, not educating them on how to recognize and appropriately respond to the various threats they are effectively guaranteed to encounter leaves them far more vulnerable than otherwise. Training them, on the other hand, helps you secure your business that much more effectively.

Not Establishing a Cybersecurity Policy or Standards

If you aren’t enforcing a baseline expectation for your team to follow in terms of their security, you are again providing an inroad into your business. Putting together the standards that your team members need to uphold—particularly in terms of passwords, multi-factor authentication, and the like—and holding them accountable to them will help to keep your business and its data secure.

Using the Default/Built-In Options

Honestly, you get what you pay for when it comes to your security, so default security options that come integrated into your solutions aren’t the wisest move. The investment into more trustworthy security options will be well worth it when you compare it to the cost of a breach. We can equip you with security solutions that you can trust your business’ data to.

Shortchanging Your Business Data

You need to consider your data itself, and what might happen if your infrastructure was to fail. Failing to maintain a comprehensive backup and data recovery strategy only risks your business further. On the other side of the coin, you need to ensure that your data is only accessible by those who need it, and remains protected both while in storage and while in transit.

Worst of All, Not Turning to the Experts for Help

Finally, the biggest network security mistake you can make is trying to go it alone, instead of leaning on the team of professionals we have here at MSPNetworks. Find out more about our multiple cybersecurity services that can help you avoid these mistakes by calling (516) 403-9001.

Despite hearing about a constant stream of cyberattacks over the past few years—most of which cause millions of dollars of damage to businesses—it might still be difficult for you to justify spending a lot of money on your business’ cybersecurity plans. There is a finite amount of capital to go around and many times CIOs and network administrators will be rebuffed by management when asking for money to spend on cybersecurity. Today, we thought we’d discuss three ways that you can spend on cybersecurity initiatives and not feel like you are throwing your money down the drain. 

Today, many organizations have gone as far as to hire a CISO, or chief information security officer to handle budgetary issues when it comes to the protection of a business’ digital resources and information systems. Even though they operate under the CIO, they typically have budgetary discretion to spend cybersecurity money as they see fit. If your business doesn’t have a defined CISO, these four tips should help you out. 

Identifying Your Organization's Digital Strengths and Weaknesses

As with most IT-related initiatives, in order to intelligently spend your organizational cybersecurity capital, you need to assess your current standing and how they relate to putting together reliability in your IT. You’ll want to start by identifying the assets that need to be protected. You may be surprised at what you find after an assessment.  Most businesses, especially in the small business sector will find that they come in woefully short in:

• Business continuity plans - Businesses tend to put in minimal effort into their contingency plans and will find that if something were to happen to their business’ information systems that they would be facing major downtime events and other disastrous situations.
• Phishing and cybersecurity training - The threat landscape is littered with businesses that haven’t prioritized training for their staff. Today, phishing attacks are the number one source of malware attacks and other cyberattacks. 
• Cybersecurity insurance - There are many cyber insurance plans out there that can help protect a business against data loss and cyberattacks. 

Regardless of your business’ situation, a full security assessment can give you the answers you are looking for to help drive a robust cybersecurity strategy. 

Aligning Your Security to Support Your Business

To understand how they get a return on your security investment, decision makers need to see potential issues in practical means. This often means breaking it down into dollars and cents. Security spending will always be justified if decision makers see how inherent risks can ultimately affect ongoing continuity and business processes in general. 

You need to make them understand that security efforts have to go further than just maintaining regulatory compliance. You will want to make them understand that your security budget is used for risk mitigation, sure, but also can benefit productivity and boost revenue. One way you can accomplish this is to automate certain security processes. Not only will this remove the repetitive and mundane tasks thrust on your IT team, it will also provide the data needed to justify the increased security spending as it will lay out how spending on security can save an incredible amount of capital when compared to dealing with cyberattacks and other security issues. 

Onboard Solid Contributors

Finally, everyone knows that new hires are some of the costliest line items in a new budget, and to justify the need for them on the cybersecurity side, you also need to cultivate a strategy that requires investment to be made. That may just be having extra eyes on your IT infrastructure, or bringing on people that can help train your employees on the best practices that will keep your business’ data and infrastructure secure. Investing in solid contributors that quickly understand the role they play in your organizational security and don’t need to have their hand held while navigating your business’ computing environment can bring significant dividends. 

Network security is always going to be a touch and go issue, especially for people who need to release funds to your IT team. Getting them the tools and resources they need to mitigate the negative impact to your business takes work but is possible. If you would like to have a conversation with one of our security professionals about how to best spend your security dollars, give MSPNetworks a call today at (516) 403-9001. 

How often do you find yourself stressing out about who has access to which data or internal resources on your company network? What about who has access to open the front door of your office or who has access to important physical resources within your building? Ensuring the security of your business’ assets is critical, and access control tools can help your company ensure that only authorized individuals have access to specific parts of your organization’s infrastructure, be it physical or digital.

What is Access Control?

Access control is, at its core, a way to restrict access to specific resources within your company based on user or role. It generally involves authorization of some sort and demands that the user verify their identity before being granted access to said resources. Think about it like asking the network for permission before being allowed onto it; once the network or infrastructure has confirmed the identity of the individual, they will have access to the resources.

Access control can be broken up into two groups: digital or cyber access control and physical access control. We’ll go over some of the benefits for both types of access control and how they can help your business keep itself safe.

Cyber Access Control

Your business undoubtedly has data on its infrastructure that should only be accessed by specific individuals and no one else. This might include sensitive employee data, applications or resources, financial records, and so on. You should be limiting access to important information like this specifically because the fewer people who have access to it, the less likely it will be compromised. Through access control tools, you can control which employees have access to specific data, applications, or resources on your network, based on their role within your organization.

Physical Access Control

Sometimes you want to keep certain users out of specific parts of your office. This is where physical access control comes into play. Physical access control might involve key cards, code-guarded doors, and even biometric scanners, with the intention of securing various parts of your office. One example of how you might use it is if you have sensitive records stored in a specific part of your office. You might keep that door locked, only accessible to specific individuals within your organization. Another example might be an access gate open only to employees of your business.

Get Started Today

MSPNetworks knows how complex it can be to implement new security solutions, especially if they require a certain level of management and maintenance, like access control systems do. We want to help your business take advantage of these solutions in a way that minimizes the additional duties and responsibilities of your organization. Through MSPNetworks, you can implement, manage, and maintain these systems without dedicating your internal resources to them; instead, you can outsource the responsibility to us! Our technicians are more than happy to assist you each step of the way.

To learn more, reach out to us at (516) 403-9001.

With cybersecurity a priority for every business that depends on their IT, there are a lot of different strategies being utilized out there to keep threats off of networks and data safe. One of the most advanced strategies being used today is enlisting a service that runs a Security Operations Center (SOC). Today, we’ll investigate what a SOC is and how it works to keep threats at bay. 

Defining SOC

The Security Operations Center is a lot like the Network Operations Center (NOC), but its whole purpose is to monitor computing networks and devices and eliminate threats to their efficient operation. While that description may seem simple, business computing infrastructures are typically complex with a lot of end users, making network and device security a complicated endeavor. 

Today’s businesses have computing infrastructures and networks that run around the clock, and the SOC is staffed to facilitate that 24/7/365 demand for security monitoring and services. Working hand-in-hand with your NOC (and perhaps other IT administrators depending on the complexity of your business’ IT), the SOC typically handles the overarching cybersecurity strategy. 

Typically, businesses want their IT to align with how they want to run their business and part of that is maintaining uptime and keeping threats off of the endpoints, networks, and the vast amount of infrastructure that makes up the network. After all, all it takes is one vulnerability to be exploited and it can create major problems. The SOC deploys a myriad of tools and strategies all designed to do one thing: stay ahead of threats to the network. 

How the SOC Operates

As we stated previously, the SOC functions much like a NOC in that its main purpose is comprehensive around-the-clock monitoring and notification. If something goes wrong on the network, the SOC will log the issue and do what it can to mitigate the issue. As these things happen it will notify the IT administrator (the NOC) of the issue to keep them in the loop. Let’s take a brief look at some of the services the SOC will provide:

• Complete assessment - The discovery process is a major part of how the SOC can be most effective. In being aware of all the hardware, applications, and other tools on the network(s) your business needs, the SOC can ensure that everything is monitored continuously. 
• Continuous monitoring - Not only will the SOC monitor software and traffic trends, it will also monitor user and system behaviors as a way to identify issues. 
• Thorough logging - Keeping large computing networks secure is a big job, and a lot of your executive and managerial team don’t have the knowledge or the time to stay on top of threats as they come in. Keeping logs of every action the SOC makes, including communications with vendors/employees and steps taken to keep the network and infrastructure free from threats is a great way to provide a layer of oversight to the security process. It’s also an important factor in staying compliant with any regulatory mandates. 
• Comprehensive Incident response and investigation - This is where the SOC really becomes a major benefit for the security of your company's IT. Not only do SOC technicians respond quickly to any incident, they also work fast to investigate what caused the issue in the first place. Going further than your typical IT management, the main benefit of the SOC is the mitigation of efficiency-sapping issues such as malware and other manners of attack. 

If you think your business could use a Security Operations Center service to keep your growing network and infrastructure clean from threats and working for your business, give MSPNetworks a call today at (516) 403-9001.

With many businesses’ increased reliance on their information systems and other IT, they need to do everything they can to keep those systems up and running and secure. This not only includes rolling out security systems that support that goal, it also demands they take the action necessary to keep these systems secure. Let’s look at four things you need to do to keep your business’ IT as secure as possible. 

Promote Strong Password Practices

Many users are just not as savvy as most organizations need them to be about their passwords. In fact, many of the most popular passwords used today are still “password” and “123456”. Even if your people are more deliberate about their password practices, many of them choose passwords that could be easily guessed if someone had knowledge about that person’s personal life. This can be a major detriment to any organization’s attempts to keep their IT secure. Here are some tips that you can use to create strong and reliable passwords:

Password Length 

It stands to reason that longer passwords are harder to guess than shorter ones. It’s been proven that passwords that are at least 12 characters long are more apt to be secure than not. The problem with longer passwords is that they are more easily forgotten and result in significant downtime. A good strategy is to create easy-to-remember passphrases with random words and a combination of upper and lower case letters, numbers and symbols. For example a password of “elephantredfootball” will usually be secure, but one that is written: “3l3ph@ntr3df00tb@ll” is even more secure. 

Unique Passwords

 Lots of people will use the same password for every account. This couldn’t be more dangerous. Think about it, if you use the same password everywhere and one account is cracked, you are looking at a situation where every account where you use that password is now compromised. 

Use Software Tools 

There are plenty of tools designed to help people keep their accounts safe. Password managers can be a good resource for people who use long or randomly-generated passwords. These platforms use encryption to ensure that all login and passwords are secure and can cut down on password-related problems that can cause downtime and unwanted IT support costs. Another tool that can help organizations keep their accounts secure is multi-factor authentication. Most platforms will provide options that will add an additional layer of security in the ways of an authentication code sent through an authentication app or separate email or text message. In using randomly-generated codes from a multi-factor authentication system, you can do more to ensure that the people who access your organization’s network-attached files and cloud services are authorized to do so. 

Train Your Staff

One of the biggest issues for organizational IT security has to be threats coming in from outside your organization. These typically come in the form of phishing attacks. A phishing attack can come in on any platform including phone, email, text message, or even social media. There are over three billion phishing emails sent every day, and that isn't even taking into account all the other attack vectors. These messages come in with the intention of getting an unwitting or distracted employee to engage with it. Once this happens, nothing good comes of it. Scammers will use this social engineering technique to gain access to protected accounts, deploy malware of all types, and disrupt an organization’s workflow. This is why it is imperative to train your staff on how to identify phishing attacks and what to do when they inevitably encounter one. 

The phishing message will typically look like it comes from a person or organization that has some semblance of authority. Scammers like to develop subterfuges acting as financial institutions, insurance companies, even executives and managers inside a company. Many will ask recipients to click on a hyperlink or download an attachment. Either action could be dire for an organization’s technology. Let’s look at some variables of phishing messages that ever organization needs to train their employees on:

Demand Immediate Action

Most phishing attacks are structured to create fear and anxiety in the recipient. This typically will get people to make impulsive decisions. The best action is to verify any suspicious action before interacting with any messages like this. 

Include Unprofessional Spelling Errors and Grammatical Faux Pas 

Many phishing messages are developed by people whose first language isn’t the recipient's language and include demands, spelling errors, and grammatical errors that no professional correspondence would include.

Come From Unrecognizable Accounts 

Many phishing messages may initially look legitimate when you look at the account it comes from. The more legitimate these messages seem the more effective they are. Consider the email address or account these messages come from before clicking on any links or downloading anything from the email. 

Keep Your Software Updated

Phishing may get most of the attention, but one of the most used attack vectors by hackers is infiltrating networks through software vulnerabilities. Most enterprise software is continuously being developed to ensure that it is a secure product. If an organization doesn’t have a patch management program where their applications are updated regularly, hackers can use any software vulnerabilities to gain unauthorized access and wreak havoc on their network. 

If your organization uses a lot of applications, it may seem like keeping everything patched is a full-time job. That’s why using automation to ensure new patches are added regularly is important. You will also want to test every patch to ensure that your software solutions function as designed. This includes frequently updating antivirus tools, firewalls, and spam filters. 

There are plenty of solutions and strategies that you can use to keep your business’ network and data secure. If you would like to have a conversation about cybersecurity and how to deploy some tools and strategies that can work to that end, give MSPNetworks a call today at (516) 403-9001. 

The world is full of people who would try to take advantage of your organization and its employees—or, in less gratifying words, scammers. They will do everything they can to try to fool your company and make a quick buck doing so. How can you make sure that the countless messages and phone calls you receive on a daily basis aren’t crooks trying to scam you out of house and home? It all starts with a little awareness.

If you are reading this blog, it’s because you want to know how you can avoid being scammed while going about your day-to-day business. Here are three tips we can offer to help you identify scammers and handle them accordingly.

Trust No One

Scammers will often try to pose as someone you know, be it a business you recognize or one that you associate with on a daily basis. There have been reports of some scammers even impersonating people within your own organization; sometimes scammers might take on the persona of someone on the executive level to convince others to wire transfer funds or to convince them to do something shady. Avoiding these scammers starts with taking a critical look at who is sending the message, and from where. If something seems a little suspicious, cross-reference the contact with what you have on file or have a conversation with the person who supposedly sent the message face-to-face.

It’s Too Good (or Bad) to Be True

Scammers often use prizes or problems to lure unsuspecting victims into giving up sensitive information. These are pretty easy to identify, as they might claim you have entered a contest that you have no recollection of entering, or they might suggest issues with an order you don’t recall placing.

You Must Act Immediately

Scammers often urge you to take immediate action, whether it’s something that is good or bad that must be addressed. There might even be an unreasonable amount of rush to perform a certain action, like resetting a password, paying a bill, or otherwise, sometimes with the threat of law enforcement or government agencies getting involved. Regardless, something of this magnitude should always be approached with a grain of salt.

If any of the above conditions are met, then you might be looking at a scammer. We urge you to use caution when dealing with any of the above situations, and when all else fails, rely on the word of professionals like MSPNetworks. We can tell you if the emails you receive are authentic or if there is a severe security flaw on your network. To learn more about how we can help your business, reach out to us at (516) 403-9001 and let our expertise speak for itself.

Workforces have been increasingly distributed and many businesses aim to continue that strategy for the foreseeable future. There are a fair share of challenges that distributed employees have themselves, but for the business, it can be tough getting them to do the things that need to be done to secure the business. Here are a few actions that need to be taken if you want to make that happen. 

What Changes When People Work Remotely?

One of the things that workers don’t understand is what exactly changes when they work from home is that it effectively distributes the operational network over a wide array of networks, making it difficult for security teams to provide the comprehensive services that they typically do. This requires the employee him/herself to do most of the diligent work to ensure that their endpoints don’t become problematic for their business. This gets more difficult as the number of new endpoints and those who are new to working remotely increase.

For many businesses, the procedures that dictate a work-from-home policy have been hashed out at some point over the past two years, but it is important to not be complacent when onboarding new workers or dealing with current staff that all have increasing numbers of endpoints in their home. Do you supply the devices that your employees are working on? Have you migrated your production to Software-as-a-Service applications?  Do you use any other cloud-hosted environments to make it easier for remote employees to access information? If not, do you have secure access for remote employees through a VPN or some other remote access service? 

Staying up to date and present on these issues will help you do more to protect your network and infrastructure from any threats that could be brought in by unwitting employees. 

The Threat of Personal Devices

For many organizations, the thought of purchasing endpoints for every employee now working from home is an impossible ask. Even if it is possible, is it a prudent way to spend capital? Some would argue yes since one of the biggest cybersecurity risks to your company is a personal device that isn’t secured against today’s various threats. This isn’t because your security platforms can’t secure your network, it is because the user may not have up-to-date antivirus software, or their applications aren’t updated properly, or they don’t use password practices that help ward against outside infiltration.

Since the threat of a data breach increases substantially when there are open vulnerabilities, it is prudent to expand your security protocols to ensure that all company-owned information is being saved to company-owned storage solutions; whether that be an onsite server or company-owned cloud platforms. The less company data is found on employees personal devices, the better the chances of protecting it. 

Collaboration Challenges

It was so when everyone was working side-by-side, but employees depend on collaboration apps even more today to get projects out the door and keep lines of communication open. Unfortunately, these tools were never designed with security in mind—they are designed with cooperative productivity in mind—so it opens up new problems for people working in these apps if their data isn’t secure in transit; and when it arrives on your employees’ computers. 

One solid tip is to ensure that the people that are collaborating on a project or service are the only ones inside a specific group. Since anyone can initiate conversations, it is important that only the people that need to be in on the conversation, data flow, and administration of any project be in the chat. Otherwise, exposing potentially sensitive information to insecure parties is possible. This happens more than you think, especially in enterprise and medium-sized business settings where people are added and removed to mailing lists and collaboration lists all the time. 

Finally, you will need to train your people. In the collaboration age, where doing more with less is a business model, you need to ensure that you invest resources in getting the people that work for you the information they need to keep your business’ IT and data secure. They don't necessarily need to be experts in computer maintenance to do this either. Just teach them the basics—how to spot phishing and other potentially harmful messages and report them to the IT administrator; how to put together a secure password; why your business has the password and security policies it does; what resources are managed by your IT team; and what they need to do to ensure that they aren’t a weak link in your business’ cybersecurity efforts. 

A lot of people like the experience of working from home, and for the business (with today’s technology) it can be of great benefit, but in order for it to be a good experience, strategies have to be altered to ensure that you aren’t constantly battling your team and scammers alike. If you would like some advice about how to navigate a remote team, the technology needed to ensure you’re ready and any other IT or workflow related questions, give MSPNetworks a call today at (516) 403-9001. 

Penetration testing is a topic that you might often hear and read about on the Internet, but you might not know exactly what it is without having it explained to you by a professional. Today, we want to clear up any misconceptions or ideas you might have about penetration testing and how it relates to your business’ network security, compliance, and regulatory requirements.

What Is Penetration Testing? 

At its core, penetration testing is a strategy used by your IT department to test the security of your systems. Basically, your team will “hack” your systems themselves to see how they might stand up to hypothetical attacks. All your hardware and software will be tested for flaws in their operating systems, applications, and other parts of your computing infrastructure, all to identify the level of risk involved with your company’s network.

The big takeaway here is that penetration testing is responsible for managing risk for your organization. The more digital tools and resources your business utilizes, the more at risk your company becomes. Therefore, you need to take any and all measures to protect your business—penetration testing included. This type of probing can show you where there are holes or flaws in your security that must be patched up. If you fail to address them, you could be staring down data breaches and the costs associated with them in the near future.

We recommend that you perform a penetration test by working with network security professionals, as they know what to look for and how to conduct the procedure. The less risk you take on with your penetration testing, the better.

Compliance Concerns

When figuring out your risk, you’ll have to undergo an extensive analysis of the worst-case scenario if you don’t comply with regulations and other forms of compliance. If you fail to adhere to compliance laws, it could cost you dearly, and not just monetarily. It could end your business’ operations entirely. Sometimes failing to stick to these regulations could mean facing criminal charges.

Penetration testing ensures that you are adequately protecting this important data. This has never been more important, especially with regulatory bodies and legislators keeping close watch on data privacy issues. If anything, we can expect even more legislation to surface, making your job as a business professional even more difficult. Better to just leave securing your infrastructure to the professionals.

Reputation

Security can forge or destroy your reputation with your customers and prospective clients. If you are negligent with your protections, it could have disastrous consequences for your company’s patrons. People want to work with those who take their security seriously, so failing to do so could put your income source on the line.

MSPNetworks can help your business improve its security situation through regular penetration testing. To learn more, reach out to us at (516) 403-9001.

Hopefully, you’re aware of how important cybersecurity is today—if not, make sure you come back to our blog often for more information on that. The Internet, for all its benefits, can easily be the source of serious threats. With today’s youth growing more connected, these threats can easily target them… making it all the more important to start teaching cybersecurity awareness and best practices early. 

Let’s examine the platform that Google has provided through its Be Internet Awesome initiative.

What Does “Be Internet Awesome” Mean?

Be Internet Awesome is designed to help educate kids about safe Internet browsing practices so they are, to quote the website, “prepared to make smart decisions.”  The idea is that, by teaching digital citizenship—a term that describes the use of technology in a responsible and effective way to empower oneself—today’s children will be ready to securely work, play, and live in what is sure to be an even more online world.

Frankly, this is a smart idea when you consider the struggles we all have with security nowadays. One of the biggest challenges that any cybersecurity initiative faces is that it feels like an added step (or in other words, an inconvenience) when it is actually an essential one. By framing what is really a person’s introduction to the Internet in terms of security, you change the paradigm by making security the default route to take.

Google has made an effort to do so by creating the Be Internet Awesome curriculum, in partnership with iKeepSafe, ConnectSafely, and the Family Online Safety Institute.

How Does “Be Internet Awesome” Work?

Be Internet Awesome provides what they call “The Internet Code of Awesome” that breaks down a few best practices in terms of Internet security… or, as the program puts it, “the fundamentals.” These fundamentals are as follows:

• Share with Care, which teaches children to think through what kind of things they are posting in terms of privacy and principle.
• Don’t Fall for Fake, which educates kids how to spot scam attempts and phishing lures.
• Secure Your Secrets, which goes over the password best practices that we’ve often preached.
• It’s Cool to Be Kind, which encourages a more positive Internet experience through the application of “treat others as you want to be treated.”
• When in Doubt, Talk It Out, which establishes that the adults in their life are there to help them work through things they may stumble across despite these practices.

These five tenets establish the behaviors that can lead to a safer Internet experience for life, and are consistently reinforced through the different tools and resources that Be Internet Awesome provides.

Interland

Kids—or, to be fair, people of all ages, really—react well to gamified content. Therefore, it makes sense that Google would choose to reinforce these lessons through gameplay. Interland is a quiz-style adventure that lets users progress through animated landscapes by correctly answering multiple choice questions, occasionally upping the ante with timed countdowns. Along the way, the user learns important vocabulary for any modern user and has important habits reinforced. Each “island,” once completed, provides a successful user with a PDF certificate available for download.

The entire experience requires no login, by the way, meaning that no progress is saved outside of the downloaded PDF. We argue that this is a good thing, as it makes each “island” infinitely repeatable until a lesson sticks—and still leaves it available as a refresher course.

Educational Resources

Be Internet Awesome also includes a downloadable curriculum for educators to follow, filled with activities and other resources to help reinforce the aforementioned fundamentals. According to the curriculum, it was created for use with kids in anywhere from second to sixth grade, but it also encourages educators to adjust the lessons to match any grade level. While definitely written for an educator by profession, even these can potentially be useful for the parent or guardian doing their best to instill positive online behaviors and habits.

Hopefully, we’ll see more efforts like Be Internet Awesome come about, as Internet security really is an important life skill. We encourage you to check it out and share it with your team and friends. It may be meant for kids, but some of the lessons in there certainly apply to business cybersecurity as well. The more people who are aware of the potential risks of the Internet, the better. Visit the website today at beinginternetawesome.withgoogle.com to see what it has to offer.

If you’d like some added assistance with your business’ cybersecurity right now, we can help with that as well. Give us a call at (516) 403-9001 to learn more about the security services we can provide.

Cyberattacks can cost businesses a lot of money. They’re also more prevalent today than ever before. It seems you can’t go a couple of news cycles without hearing about some organization that has been hacked or scammed and it’s resulted in the sensitive data the organization holds being sold online, vast operational downtime, or worse. For this reason, many organizations have deliberately built up their cybersecurity infrastructure, enhanced their policies, and invested in training to ensure that they aren’t the next victim. Unfortunately, this attention doesn’t always work. 

The Federal Bureau of Investigation has found that cyberattacks increased about 400 percent from 2019 to 2020. Doing what you can to keep your organization’s computing resources secure is extremely important. The cybersecurity outlays made by businesses and other organizations have been immense, and that has led to a sobering reality. Most of any organization’s security problems, especially relating to malware deployment, is due to their employees’ lack of conscientious decision-making when faced with problematic situations. 

It doesn’t matter how much more secure or how much smarter you make your organization’s information system security, it can all be for naught if one employee doesn’t do what they should. This is extremely frustrating for IT people, since it is one of their core responsibilities to keep these systems secure. Let’s take a look at how employees fail to keep their credentials secure and what you can do to remedy this worrisome trend. 

Employees as Attack Vectors

Increasingly, workplace strategies have been altered significantly. In fact, millions of workers are currently working remotely now, effectively distributing a business’ operational network. For the IT professional who is in tune with the current threat landscape, workers that don’t do everything they can to protect organizational data and infrastructure are typically viewed as ignorant; or worse yet, as a saboteur. Unfortunately for everyone, the driving factor is not negligence or a willingness to do their organization harm, it is out of workplace stress, a factor that is difficult to quantify, and harder yet to eliminate. 

A study conducted by the Harvard Business Review found some interesting results about the role stress plays in maintaining their assumed role in protecting their organization’s cybersecurity. The study found that two-of-every-three workers failed to fully adhere to organizational cybersecurity policies at least once in the 10 workdays where the study was conducted. During the study, it was found that employees simply ignore the cybersecurity policies around five percent of the time. This may not seem like a lot, but if you consider that it only takes one non-compliant action to result in a major data breach, having dozens of such instances happen each day is putting organizations in jeopardy. 

You may be asking yourself, “If they follow procedure 19 times out of 20, why don’t they follow it that other time?” Well this is where this seemingly clear issue gets cloudy. The study got the answer to this question. The top three were:

• “To better accomplish tasks for my job.”
• “To get something I needed.”
• “To help others get their work done.”

In fact, of all the respondents, 85 percent that were non-compliant to their organizational cybersecurity policies responded with one of these three answers. These employees knowingly broke the rules and in doing so put their organization in jeopardy, but not because they were lazy or they just had it, it was because that was the only way they could efficiently get the work done. Situations where a person is damned if they do and damned if they don’t, they tend to pick the priority. 

To most workers, they weren't hired as cybersecurity professionals; they are hired to do a job and if cybersecurity policy gets in the way, they will choose productivity over security every time. If you consider that only three percent of policy breaches were acts of true defiance or sabotage, the 97 percent of the rest are likely perpetuated by dutiful employees. It’s hard to justify stern reprimand for a person who thinks they have the business’ best interests in mind.

Redefining the Importance of Cybersecurity

For the average employee, following procedure is typically going to be a distant second to maintaining productivity. After all, there are very few instances over time where someone was labeled as “great at their job” because they didn’t accidentally start a cyberattack. Moreover, most organizations’ IT support team can’t really give people the benefit of the doubt; most employees that don’t follow security procedures are looked on as negligent or deliberately working against their best efforts. The truth is most training platforms and policies (as they are known to the employee) don’t take into account that there are gray areas that don’t line up with the expectations put on employees by their managers. 

To this end, it is more important than ever for employees to be involved in the creation and development of workable cybersecurity policies that take into account that business moves fast and sometimes a person that is focused on doing the best job they can, isn’t going to be focused on maintaining network security. Managers also need to ensure the members of their team know what they need to do and what those actions accomplish to reinforce the importance of their cybersecurity efforts. 

Most businesses celebrate employees that excel at their jobs. Today, their job is actively changing and they have to know why straying from procedure is a major problem. The problem is that one wrong move and the company is dealing with malware and reputation troubles, and loss of revenue. While it might be ridiculous to celebrate adherence to corporate cybersecurity policies, people have had cake for less.

If your business needs help balancing productivity with their cybersecurity policies, give the IT security professionals at MSPNetworks a call today at (516) 403-9001. 

In the business world, it can be difficult to know who to trust in regard to cybersecurity. In many cases, businesses are simply opting to not trust any device, friend or foe, when it comes to their data security. This type of zero-trust model is slowly becoming the norm, and it’s one that your organization might consider moving forward.

What is Zero-Trust?

In short, zero-trust is exactly what it sounds like. By default, there is no trust established between devices, accounts, or users on your network. This essentially means that anyone who wants to access information stored on your infrastructure will need to verify their identity, no matter who they are. You could be the CEO or a network administrator and you’d still have to verify your identity in the same way as your general office worker. This is generally accomplished through some form of external authentication.

There are several benefits to implementing a zero-trust model, one of which is that it drastically increases security. When everyone is constantly verifying their identities to go about their day-to-day business, you can bet that your network will be as secure as can be. On the other side of this, however, is what happens when someone is unable to authenticate themselves for whatever reason. Like any new technology solution implementation, it’s safe to say that there will be a rough patch at the beginning of implementation, but once you get through it, you can experience network security, unlike anything you have ever seen.

What Are the Downsides?

The biggest issue with implementing zero-trust policies is that it is a major infrastructural and organizational change, particularly for large businesses that have larger workforces and even more devices that access data on a regular basis. The amount of time, effort, and investment in zero-trust policies and technologies can make it seem like a daunting task to implement, which is why we urge you to think the logistics through before committing to any such practice. To this end, we can help with a comprehensive security audit and assessment to help you determine if zero-trust makes sense for your business.

Plus, if you do decide you want to pursue this policy, MSPNetworks can help your business work toward a zero-trust security model by equipping your organization with the tools needed to keep tabs on all facets of your network security. Whether it’s implementing multi-factor authentication or implementing additional protections on your network, you know you can trust us to make it happen.

To learn more about zero-trust policies and security frameworks, reach out to MSPNetworks at (516) 403-9001.

Getting your staff to care about your organizational network and data security may be more difficult than you might think, but it’s not a lost cause. Today, keeping your business’ organizational security strong relies heavily on your staff’s willingness to follow the right practices, so today we thought we’d give you seven tips to get your people to care about security

Be Up Front

One of the main reasons employees don’t often care about cybersecurity is the overt secrecy surrounding it. Today’s organization needs to come clean when it comes to the constant threats that are out there. If you want your people to have a vested interest in keeping your business’ information systems and data secure, you need to level with them. After all, they can’t help if they don’t understand.

Make it a Personal Investment

Your company holds a lot of your employees personal data. Let them know that along with any sensitive and proprietary data that could be lost in a data breach, that their data could also be vulnerable. In order to sufficiently secure your data and theirs, they need to know what’s at stake if they don’t actively follow cybersecurity procedures.

Top Down Security

Every member of your organization needs to understand that they could be targeted by hackers and fall victim to these threats. The more your employees understand that management is actively complying with security policies, the more willing they will be to alter the way they consider cybersecurity.

Gamify Your Process

People tend to be more engaged when there is incentive baked into a policy. Gamification is the strategy of scoring a person based on their efforts. This strategy works wonders for productivity so it stands to reason that it would work for cybersecurity awareness and following any organizational policy that’s in place to keep your systems and data secure. 

Standardize Procedure

One of the most important variables to get your people to follow the rules, is to have them in place to begin with. In cybersecurity, confusion can be a huge albatross, so ensuring that everyone is playing with the same rulebook is a must. This includes building procedures to handle attacks such as phishing as well as password hygiene and many other security-based policies. The more consistent your procedures are, the more likely your staff is to understand and follow them. 

Start from Day One

With all the threats that are out there at the moment, you will want to stress the importance of cybersecurity with current and new employees, alike. If you start hammering home the importance of compliance with security procedures from the day an employee starts at your business, the more likely they will continue to comply with them as they undertake their job; which for most of your staff, isn’t strictly cybersecurity. 

Keep Training

Security training is becoming commonplace at almost every organization, largely because the threats that it faces could have devastating consequences. You will want to invest in comprehensive training and re-training to ensure that your employees understand the importance of your cybersecurity initiatives, and that they are up-to-date on any and all changes to policy or strategy. 

Cybersecurity is a team effort today and if your organization isn’t stressing the importance of it, it’s only a matter of time until it rears its head. If you would like to learn more about training your employees on the best practices of cybersecurity,  creating a cybersecurity policy that works to keep your information systems secure, or if you would just like to talk to one of our IT professionals about cybersecurity best practices and procedures, give us a call today at (516) 403-9001.

The holidays are times for people to come together, even in these incredibly stressful times, so you’ll want to make sure that you are taking all the necessary precautions on both a personal level and a technological level. Here are some ways that you can keep yourself safe from a technology perspective this holiday season.

Be Cautious of Your Internet Connections

When traveling, it’s extremely important to know how secure your web connection is. Places where tons of people gather, like airports and hotels, are known to have cesspools for Internet connections laden with threats of all kinds. You never know what is lurking on wireless networks that are not secured by the same precautions found on your own in-house network. For times when this is not possible, we recommend using a virtual private network to create an encrypted tunnel between your device and your company’s network if you are going to do work while traveling.

This is a little different than those consumer-based VPNs you might hear about on commercials for podcasts, YouTube videos, etc. These services, like NordVPN, TunnelBear, ExpressVPN, and others aren’t inherently designed for businesses to use as a VPN. However, these services typically do have some merit when traveling, because they encrypt your data that gets sent over Wi-Fi. This can offer a layer of protection if you do have to join a public network. Keep in mind though, you get what you pay for. Most of the free VPN services, even when they claim they don’t store any information about you, tend to store information about you. 

If you want to discuss specific use-cases with us, we’re happy to answer questions, or help equip your business with a professional VPN for your entire staff to connect to securely. Just give us a call at (516) 403-9001.

Enable Multi-Factor Authentication and Location Services on Mobile Devices

We know that you don’t want to think about losing devices, but it’s important to take measures to ensure that doing so does not put the data on your devices at risk. Solutions like multi-factor authentication and location services can help you keep your devices secure even if they are lost, and they can even give you an idea of where to look for a device in the event you don’t think it has been stolen.

Implement Data Backup

While you’re at it, you should also implement data backup services so that you don’t lose any data located on these devices in the event you have to remotely wipe them or are unable to locate them—after all, airlines have been known to misplace luggage on occasion. It never hurts to be prepared. In general, it’s a good idea to have data backup; you never know when you might need it, even without someone stealing your phone or laptop.

Wherever your travels take you this holiday season, know that MSPNetworks has your back! Make sure you follow our blog so you are prepared to handle any technology situations you come across this holiday season.

The holiday season is a time for merriment and good cheer, but hackers have historically used it to take advantage of peoples’ online shopping tendencies. Phishing scams are always on the rise during the holiday season, so you need to take steps now to ensure that you don’t accidentally put yourself at risk—especially with voice spoofing emerging as a threat for Amazon orders.

This particular threat involves an email scam in which users are encouraged to call a number listed to confirm an order, usually one with a large price tag associated with it. This tactic is used to harvest phone numbers and credit card credentials that can be used in later attacks. Security researchers at Avanan have found that the contact number listed on the email is not Amazon’s; instead, it’s a scammer who records the phone number with Caller ID. The user is then contacted by the scammer who requests further financial information, claiming that they are to cancel the order.

Anyone familiar with Amazon and how it works will immediately be suspicious of these practices. First, most people who use the service will know how to cancel an Amazon order. All they need to do is log into their account and do it from there. Second, if you ordered something, Amazon should technically have your financial information already on record, so why would it need to be confirmed once again? It just sounds fishy. All one needs to do to avoid these threats is slow down, take a step back, and don’t go looking for problems that may not even exist.

These scams revolving around online retailers are not a new concept, but this one is notable because the emails are able to get past spam blockers and content filters. It manages this by using legitimate links within the body of the email, so your email solution might not flag it as spam or a threat.

We offer the following advice to you:

• Don’t call numbers you don’t recognize.
• Don’t click on suspicious links in your email inbox.
• Don’t give out your personal information or credit card information just because someone on the phone told you to.
• Check the sender for any message you feel is suspicious to ensure it is legitimate.
• Check your account before responding to any correspondence from the sender.
• Set up multi-factor authentication, just in case.

MSPNetworks can help your business stay safe this holiday season with advanced security solutions. To learn more, reach out to us at (516) 403-9001.

You’ve probably already heard about Log4j this week. Maybe you don’t recognize the name, but it’s likely that you have run across emails or news articles talking about this widespread vulnerability. You need to take it very seriously.

What is Log4j?

When developing software, developers utilize different programming languages. One of these languages is called Java, and in Java, developers have multiple libraries to work with. Log4j is one of those libraries, and it has recently been uncovered that there is a huge vulnerability that cybercriminals can exploit to gain access to your systems and data. It’s a huge open door that has been there for years, and now that the world knows about it, it is just a matter of time before it is being used to do damage.

This particular Java library has been used a lot over the years. The vulnerability impacts some pretty big names in software and cloud hosting, such as:

• Amazon
• Apple
• Cisco
• Fortinet
• Google
• IBM
• Microsoft
• SonicWall
• Sophos
• VMware

…as well as others, large and small. Even the United States’ Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) is affected.

Is My Business Impacted by Log4j?

It’s almost certain that it is. We can’t stress enough that this is a big issue, and that major tech companies are scrambling to put out patches. It doesn’t just affect the folks at Amazon and Microsoft, it affects those that use their products as well.

What You Can Do to Fight Back Against Log4j

One of the scary things about this vulnerability is that most businesses are at the mercy of their vendors to patch it, and some experts think it will take years before this vulnerability is totally removed from the world. Fortunately, as we mentioned earlier, the big names in tech are scrambling to get a patch out the door, and many, if not most, already have.

However, it also falls on the impacted webmasters and businesses to apply the patches that these developers put out. Beyond that, it is critical that you as an individual remain vigilant in your cybersecurity hygiene. That goes double for your business.

For example, let’s assume for a moment that you’re a user on a fantasy football league website. If that website relies on technology that Log4j impacts and they don’t apply the fixes, the information you’ve provided to the website—account details, financial information, and whatever else—would be vulnerable and easy to steal.

This applies to every website or application that uses this technology; if they don't react, your account with them is not very safe. 

The problem is, as a user, you can’t really tell if a website or piece of software is using this particular Java library. In other words:

Everything just potentially got a little more dangerous, when it comes to cybersecurity. It’s up to everyone to work harder to protect themselves.

How to Protect Yourself from Log4j, as an Individual and a Business

It’s critical to use strong password hygiene. “Password123” isn’t going to cut it. Using the same passwords across multiple accounts needs to stop, immediately. This involves following the basic password best practices that we always talk about, like:

• Using a unique password for each account and website
• Using a mix of alphanumeric characters and symbols
• Using a sufficiently complex passcode to help with memorability without shorting your security
• Keeping passwords to yourself

Audit your IT IMMEDIATELY

All organizations need to bring in a professional to audit all of their technology and update what can be updated to remove the influence of Log4j. Not only will this help protect your business and your employees, it will also protect the interests of your clients and customers. 

We recommend that you give MSPNetworks a call at (516) 403-9001 to schedule an appointment. This is extremely important, and you need a professional set of eyes to audit your IT to make sure you aren’t affected by this awful vulnerability. 

Many, many companies have adopted remote work policies and practices since the COVID-19 pandemic forced most to downsize (if not cease outright) on-site operations about two years ago. Now, as we enter 2022, it seems a good time to reexamine the security that we have protecting our businesses and the workers currently operating remotely.

The Pandemic Has Shown Businesses How Well Remote Work Can Work

Despite the resistance that many initially had to the concept of remote work, it quickly proved to be a blessing for those companies that adopted it. Now, about two years later, its value has continued as it has kept a lot of businesses open and operational to some extent as infection rates have fluctuated. This approach has also proven popular amongst the employees who are participating in remote work efforts. A PwC survey conducted in August revealed that nearly a fifth of these workers would like to be fully remote, even without COVID in the picture.

However, for all the benefits that remote operations have provided to businesses, we need to address the elephant that snuck into the room with them: the cybersecurity challenges that remote work and working from home have introduced.

Unfortunately, Remote Work Can Provide Cybercriminals with Opportunity

Despite all the positive aspects that remote work has to offer a business, we can’t pretend that it doesn’t come with its share of challenges—specifically, in terms of maintaining an acceptable level of cybersecurity.

The reality of it all is that your team members simply aren’t going to have the same protections in their home as you should in the office, which means you need to do all you can to supplement the protections you have in place.

Security Issues Can Come from All Angles

Unfortunately, there are many factors in play that can unpleasantly influence your business’ cybersecurity. Not only may your team members be using their own technology to do their job, they’ll certainly be doing so on a network that you don’t have control over. As a result, this network will almost certainly lack the protections you have on your business.

Furthermore, as they’re working remotely, your team members are going to be on their own. This makes it that much less likely that they’ll be as focused on their security practices as they should be, and more exposed to threats as a result.

So, While Remote Work Can Be Valuable, You Need to Keep It From Making You Vulnerable

It’s obvious that you need to protect your business from any threats it faces…the question is how you can do that. There are a lot of practices and solutions that we recommend a business have its users adopt to help shore up these vulnerabilities. For instance:

• If an employee has no choice but to use a public Wi-Fi connection, make sure they are utilizing a reputable VPN (virtual private network) to secure data while it is being transmitted
• To help prevent employees from transferring data from work devices to private ones, putting together a Bring Your Own Device policy to help establish some control over the device and allowing them remote access to your infrastructure or using the cloud helps to secure your data.
• Password practices need to be upheld just as vigorously as they would be in the office. Not only do they need to be complex enough, they all need to be unique. Multi-factor authentication (MFA) should also be implemented to double-down on the security that accounts are protected by.
• Physical security also needs to be remembered when working remotely. Devices should never be left unattended in a public place, and it is not a bad idea to secure them in the home as an added safety precaution.
• All devices used for work, including the modem and router supplying wireless Internet, need to be kept up-to-date so that they remain secure.
• All remote users should be reminded of the threat that scams and phishing attacks pose, with ongoing training and other awareness-enhancing activities being conducted on a regular basis.

Yes, this is a lot, but it’s all important to do to keep your business secure. We’re here to help businesses do so. Give us a call at (516) 403-9001 to learn more.

Hackers have often used email to trick users into clicking on fraudulent links or to hand over important credentials through phishing scams, but these are usually blocked by an enterprise-level spam blocker. However, hackers have learned that there is indeed a way around these spam blockers, and it’s through popular social media websites.

One of the big reasons why spam blockers are so successful is because it examines the content of the messages you receive and makes a determination about its authenticity. One way that it does so is by looking at links within the email body itself. If the link is legitimate and seems to go to a normal, recognized source, then the message can be considered “legitimate,” even if it is not necessarily safe.

Hackers are now attempting to use social media websites to subvert this weakness in spam blockers; they use the sites as a middle-man of sorts, using the social media website to write a post which includes a suspicious link, then using the social media platform’s sharing capabilities to effectively mask the suspicious link behind that of the social media platform.

This is a particularly crafty approach that should not be taken lightly, and it’s already in use at this present moment. Take, for example, a recent campaign using Facebook as the delivery mechanism for phishing threats. In this scenario, hackers send victims an email message suggesting that they have violated Facebook’s terms of service on their page. When the victim clicks on the link in the email, they are brought to a legitimate Facebook post further detailing the issues that must be addressed. The post prompts the user to click on a phishing link, and the rest is history.

The moral of the story is that you can never trust links in your email inbox from unknown users, even if they appear to be legitimate. Phishing can happen anywhere, especially where you least expect it, like on social media websites and even support forums. If the links look a little too suspicious, then you should wait to take action until you have consulted a security professional like those at MSPNetworks. Our technicians are happy to review the contents of messages and make determinations on their authenticity, particularly for situations like the above one where it’s not clear if the link is legitimate or not.

Now, if you don’t have a spam blocking solution in place, we can help you out with that, too. With a unified threat management tool, you can take full advantage of great security solutions designed to keep you protected from the majority of threats. To learn more, reach out to us at (516) 403-9001.

We often discuss how your business can avoid the impact of ransomware, but what we don’t often discuss is what happens to businesses that do, in fact, suffer from such a devastating attack. We want to use today’s blog as an opportunity to share what your business should (and should not) do in the event of a ransomware attack, as well as measures you can take to avoid suffering from yet another in the future.

First of All, Don’t Panic

If you suddenly get a message from a ransomware attacker claiming that the files on your computer have been locked down, first of all, don’t panic. Ransomware is scary, but there is a chance that the attacker really hasn’t infected your device. Some recent threat actors have been able to make a quick buck with “fake ransomware” attacks, where the threat is so dangerous that they can make money just from the panic these attacks can create.

Also, you absolutely should not pay the ransom without first consulting your trusted IT resource. You don’t know if the situation is out of control just yet, so it’s best to not make any impulsive decisions. Paying the ransom only proves that ransomware is effective and further funds future ransomware attacks against other businesses like yours.

Contact Your Trusted IT Resource

Regardless of the extent of the attack, your business needs to contact its trusted IT resource to accurately gauge its impacts. Depending on how bad it is, you might be able to get away with restoring a data backup to a point before the ransomware attack struck. If the hacker is using double-extortion methods, however, this might not be possible. Either way, you don’t want to take action until you have had a discussion with your IT resource about what to do. There is almost always another option available, so you want to know what these are before you commit to any one in particular.

Implement Proactive Measures for the Future

Obviously you don’t want to suffer from another ransomware attack in the future, so it’s best practice to prevent these types of threats from infecting your infrastructure in the first place. You can do so with comprehensive security measures designed to keep threats out of your systems. Furthermore, we recommend that you implement multi-factor authentication and train your employees to identify threats. Doing so can keep your employees from making silly mistakes due to social engineering attacks, as well as limit user access controls in the event someone does slip up.

MSPNetworks can help you implement any measures needed to keep ransomware at bay, including cybersecurity training for your business’ employees so they are more cognizant of the threat in the future. To learn more, reach out to us at (516) 403-9001.

Artificial intelligence, commonly known as AI, is used in several different ways in various industries, but one of the most impactful has been with cybersecurity and its automation. On the other hand, however, are the hackers who use AI in ways that fly in the face of the efforts of these cybersecurity professionals and use AI for cybercrime. What are some ways that AI is used in cybercrime, and why is it so scary for businesses to handle?

Deepfakes

The term “deepfake” stems from the words “deep learning” and “fake media.” Essentially, a deepfake uses false imaging or audio to create something which appears to be authentic when it really isn’t. Used incorrectly, deepfakes can be incredibly harmful in a variety of ways. Imagine reading something on the Internet and having it be accompanied by a fake video or image that skews your perspective and leads you to believe one thing rather than another. AI-generated deepfakes can (and have) been used in this way, and they can even be used in extortion and misinformation schemes.

Deepfakes use AI to generate realistic videos, typically of a famous person with a lot of source material online to pull from. Videos can be generated of a celebrity or government official doing and saying virtually anything, misguiding the viewer and causing confusion. 

AI-Supported Hacking Attacks

AI can also help cybercriminals when they are going about your average hacking attack, like trying to crack passwords or infiltrate a system. For example, hackers can use machine learning and artificial intelligence to analyze and parse password sets; they then use the information gleaned from these password sets to more accurately guess passwords. These systems can even go so far as to learn how people adjust their passwords over time.

Furthermore, there have been instances of hackers using machine learning to inform and automate their hacking practices. Some systems can use machine learning to identify weak points in a system and penetrate them through those weaker links. The systems used can then autonomously improve their operations for greater effectiveness. It is quite concerning to say the least.

Human Impersonation and Social Engineering

AI can also impersonate human beings themselves by imitating their behaviors. Through the use of automated bots, it is possible for hackers to create fake accounts that are capable of performing many of the everyday things your average user might do on social networking sites, like liking posts, sharing things out, and more. These bots can even be used to turn a profit in certain circumstances.

The possibilities for artificial intelligence in a cybercriminal’s toolbox are just as endless as they are for augmenting the operations of businesses, and it is a threat that should be closely monitored both now and in the future.

Don’t let cybercrime of any type complicate your business’ future. To learn more about what we can do for your business to keep it safe and sound from all kinds of threats, reach out to MSPNetworks at (516) 403-9001.