MSPNetworks Blog

It’s easy to use the terms “patches” and “updates” as if they mean the same thing, and they are often used interchangeably within the same context. However, understanding the difference between the two can make a world of difference in terms of how you approach implementing each of them. We’re here to clear things up a bit and help you better understand the patches and updates you deploy on a month-to-month basis.

What is the Big Difference?

Patches and updates are critical to ensuring that your devices and mission-critical software are kept secure from potential threats. Over time, vulnerabilities or operational issues which impact security could arise, and software developers rise to the occasion to resolve them by issuing these patches and updates. The big difference between the two is scope and scale.

Patches are generally used for quick fixes to specific problems which need attention. You can think of it like patching a rip or tear in a piece of clothing. You get a piece of fabric, throw it over the problem, and sew it on for a fix.

Updates, on the other hand, are more structural in nature, and they are generally larger in scope. They might address multiple problems at once. It’s like changing the fabric of your shirt entirely rather than just patching the hole.

Why Should You Care?

In short, the biggest reason why you should care about the difference between patches and updates is that it could very well impact your ability to do your job correctly.

Let’s say you implement a new update. Yes, it solves several problems with the security infrastructure of your software or applications, but it could very well introduce new bugs or operational issues that either affect the way your team gets work done or your ability to perform specific tasks. Imagine if someone updated your operating system overnight and, all of a sudden, the user interface changes, or a critical task you need to perform no longer works the way you expect it to. You have to take the time to adjust to the update or review documentation to ensure that it’s not going to disrupt your operations too profoundly.

Make Patches and Updates Easy to Apply

We know that applying patches and updates can be a bit disruptive to your day-to-day duties and responsibilities. Furthermore, you don’t want to be applying patches and updates on a whim; you need to approach these carefully to ensure they have minimal negative impacts on your business’ operations. This is why MSPNetworks offers remote patching and security update services. We can apply any patches or updates your systems need without the need for an on-site visit. With our management tools, you can rest assured that someone is keeping an eye out for your systems.

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

Mobile devices demand a special type of attention in order to ensure security. You want to ensure that your devices are protected as well as possible, but you also need to ensure that this does not come at the expense of your employees’ productivity or efficiency. We’ve put together a list of common security issues you might encounter when securing your mobile devices, as well as a couple of practices you can implement to work toward an adequate level of cybersecurity for your mobile infrastructure.

Malicious Applications

Mobile applications will be crucial to productivity with your mobile devices. Just like how laptops and desktops run software and programs, mobile devices require applications for various tasks, including data storage, file access, communication, productivity, and many more. You can usually find these applications on the designated app store for Android or iOS, but you might have to dodge a couple of malicious applications in the process. Make sure you are downloading the appropriate app from a trusted developer rather than a fake, malicious one.

Unsecured Connections

Mobile devices will be connecting to wireless networks in order to dodge the use of mobile data for every little task, but the problem with most public wireless networks is that they are unsecured and susceptible to attacks from all sorts of threats. Even if they are secured, they likely are not secured appropriately, and hackers might be able to intercept or view data traveling to and from your device.

Lost or Stolen Devices

One of the major challenges of mobile devices is the fact that they are… well, mobile, and as such, more likely to be lost compared to your traditional in-house technology solutions. It’s easy enough to misplace a smartphone or laptop, and it’s just as easy for a thief to walk away with it if you take your eyes off of them long enough. 

Security Solutions

To keep your mobile devices from becoming a major pain in the neck from a security standpoint, we recommend that you implement the following solutions and measures. They will go a long way toward keeping your business and its data safe.

• Mobile Device Management: An MDM solution gives your business the power to control app downloads and permissions on devices, all while remotely wiping lost or stolen devices as needed. It makes keeping track of your company’s mobile devices as easy as can be.
• Virtual Private Networks: A VPN is a powerful security tool that gives your mobile devices access to an encrypted connection to your business’ data infrastructure. This means that a hacker won’t simply be able to steal data while it’s in transit, and if they do, they will have to deal with military-grade encryption to make heads or tails of it.

Mobile device security doesn’t have to be difficult; make it easier by contacting MSPNetworks at (516) 403-9001!

Anyone who has a mailbox or an email knows all about junk mail. We all receive Publisher’s Clearing House entries, calls about your car’s extended warranty, promotions for items and events that you swore that you discontinued by typing “STOP”, and just needless spam that you waste your time going through and deleting. We receive unsolicited messages every single day.

It’s actually more routine now than annoying. 

Today, there are more scams directed at the average individual than ever; and, as a result, it can have negative effects on every organization if someone mistakenly interacts with the wrong one. If you think it isn’t a big deal consider that these scams cost individuals, businesses, and governments over a trillion dollars every year. That’s >$1,000,000,000,000. These scams affect more people from all different types of age groups more than any other crime. Today, we’ll go through why so many people fall for scams and what you can do to protect yourself against being part of this staggering statistic. 

More Scams, More Exposure

The first reason that there are more people falling for scams is because there are just so many scams sent out. For years, there were lottery scams that cost people in the neighborhood of $200 million dollars, but today that cost has doubled; presumably because there are just more scams of that type sent every day. Before everyone depended so highly on the Internet, scams would happen, but they would be more intimate. Individual people stealing money by getting people to invest in real estate scams. Even the Bernie Madoff scam, that defrauded investors of over $64 billion dollars, was the work of a lone firm where many of the people working there thought the company was legitimate. 

 Today, there are teams (companies, in fact) that are in business to defraud people. Since the cost of perpetuating this type of crime has dropped substantially, businesses with the model of fraud have grown and are responsible for the major increase in stolen money.

 What’s worse, it is more difficult than ever to catch and prosecute these criminal organizations. They often operate out of nations that don’t have the type of law enforcement infrastructure needed to combat them. Think about this: Have you recently got a phone call from your area code only to answer it and it be a scam caller? This isn’t somebody in the next town trying to sell you on an extended warranty for your car, it is someone a world away using a routing program to spoof the number that will work to engage the call’s recipient. 

Scams Have Targets

Another reason people are falling for scams is that they are becoming more and more sophisticated by the day. Scams today use the names of popular brands or even people’s own companies to get them to engage with the ruse. Most businesses move fast, especially on the Internet and if a subordinate gets an email from their direct supervisor to send money, login credentials, or other sensitive information, many workers will ignore the warning signs and complete the task. Only after the fact will they understand that they’ve been had by an organization that’s whole mission is to steal data and defraud individuals. 

 The more familiar the tone of the correspondence and the more familiar the whole thing is presented as, the more apt that people are going to let their guard down and interact with these scams. Somewhat surprisingly, younger people are more likely to ignore warning signs and move forward. There are more millennials in the current workforce than any other generation and their lack of awareness, or even their desire to do their job well, can lead to major issues. Since older employees tend to have experience dealing directly with the people they need to deal with, they aren’t as targeted as younger employees. That said, there were over 1.2 trillion phishing emails sent in 2020, and that number continues to rise every year, so everyone remains a target. 

What You Can Do

Well as a business owner or manager, you need to do everything in your power to keep your people educated about how to interact with scam emails, phone calls, and instant messages. Let’s look at some good tips to follow when educating your staff and building your cybersecurity strategy. 

• Be alert - In order to catch a phishing scam before it creates a headache for you, you have to interact with every message you get with a degree of skepticism.
• Verify - The best way to avoid troubles from email and messages sent to you that demand action is to verify with the sender. It doesn’t take that long and any grief you may get from it is far less than the grief you would get if you sent money or information to an unauthorized person outside the organization.
• Look for telltale phishing signs - Does the message you received demand things of you that aren’t normal? Does it have links, phone numbers, or attachments that the email directs you to interact with? Are there spelling and grammar errors? If the message you’ve received doesn’t seem legitimate, it likely isn’t.
• Use security software - One of the best ways to fish out phishing emails is to use a spam protection program. Most enterprise emails have one built in, but they don’t always catch all of them. If you find that you are getting spam emails in your inbox, you can direct them to your spam folder. 
• Keep a backup (or several) - One of the best ways to protect your business in lieu of all the scams and hacks going on is to ensure that your applications and data are backed up. At MSPNetworks, we utilize a backup and disaster recovery service that keeps your files backed up onsite and in an offsite data center to ensure that when you need to get to your backups, you can. 

 If you would like to know more about how to avoid online scams and keep your business more secure, give us a call today at (516) 403-9001 and return to our blog regularly.

When we think about cybersecurity, we usually think about protecting our computers from viruses, right?

I’d imagine a few of our older readers remember a time when you would go to the store and buy antivirus software that came in a big brightly-colored box with a CD in it each year.

As you probably already know, things aren’t as simple anymore.

Cybersecurity is a Huge Problem, Because It’s a Lucrative Business

Maybe the idea of going to the store to purchase the latest version of Norton Antivirus for my home PC makes me wax nostalgic a little, but things have become much more complicated over the last couple of decades when it comes to cybersecurity.

Gone are the days where computer malware simply exists to spread and annoy users. Well, that stuff still exists, but most users are pretty well protected from it, thanks to free antivirus software and built-in protections that are baked right into the various operating systems we’ve come to depend on.

Unfortunately, cybercriminals started to figure out the value of their skills and have been able to turn their talents into careers. I won’t dive too deep into the history of this, as it’s not even necessarily new, but it has been a major factor behind the majority of attacks against personal users and businesses.

It’s estimated that over one percent of the entire global economy is lost to cybercrime each year, and that rate has been increasing quickly over the years. A single percentage might not seem like much, but it’s monetary worth at least $600 billion, and it’s also likely that percentage is a bit higher as many crimes go unreported. As a comparison, the US film industry is about 3.2% of the GDP, and the US professional sports industry is about 1% of the GDP.

That’s not nothing.

Cybercriminals Treat It Like a Business

It’s pretty rare to come across a business that doesn’t have some form of antivirus these days (thank goodness). That’s good. All businesses need to have centrally-managed, carefully monitored, and thoroughly maintained antivirus.

Let that sink in, though. Most businesses have this base-level of protection, but cybercrime is booming.

You need to look at cybercriminals and realize there are very clever, hard-working entrepreneurs within this group, and that they are always looking for ways to grow and expand. You need to compare cybercriminals to other businesses you see today. They are constantly trying to disrupt in the same way that Uber and Lyft disrupted the taxi industry… while also disrupting the course of business for everybody else involved.

It’s a business about making the most money with minimal effort, using tactics that can easily be repeated and have a high success rate.

Look at them as your competitors in sort of a weird sense. They are ruthlessly vying for your revenue.

It’s Time to Take Cybersecurity Seriously

For many businesses, complying with certain levels of cybersecurity protections is the law, but it’s more than that too. Even if you are a healthcare practice that is strictly following HIPAA and every other compliance regulation, you need to review and push that envelope a little harder to stay ahead of those who are working just as hard to get a piece of your business.

It’s terrible, it really is. Like I said, I miss the days when it was as simple as installing new antivirus every year.

That said, we are here to help. At MSPNetworks, we take a security-first approach to everything we do, and we can help your business protect itself. It’s not worth waiting. Even if you just want a second set of eyes to evaluate your network, don’t hesitate to give us a call today at (516) 403-9001.

Insurance is a great asset, should you ever need it… including where your business technology is concerned. If you weren’t aware, there is a form of insurance—cyber insurance—that you can purchase in case your business suffers from a data breach.

Is this additional form of insurance worth the investment? Absolutely.

Let’s take a few moments and explore why you’ll be happy to have cyber insurance when the time comes

What is Cyber/Cybersecurity/Cyber Liability Insurance?

Cyber insurance, like any other form of insurance, is meant to help cover the financial impacts of a given event. In this case, the event would be some kind of cyberattack.

It can be easy to underestimate the fallout that a cyberattack can have. Sure, there’s the immediate issue that the attack itself creates in terms of lost time and productivity, but there are plenty of other impacts and aftereffects that are also associated with these attacks as well.

For instance, if you’ve lost data, you could very well face significant fines from the government, on top of the definite lack of trust the general populous will likely feel toward your business once word gets out about your data loss event.

Then, you also have to consider how much it will cost to restore your business, fixing the systems that have been impacted and influenced by the attack. You need to account for all the business that the aforementioned lack of trust will lose you. You need to factor in the cost of all the notifications that you will need to send out to those impacted by your data breach.

This is a pretty, pretty penny… far more than you can realistically budget away in your IT costs.

Hence, cyber insurance.

What Can Cyber Insurance Help Cover?

There are assorted needs that cyber insurance can help you to pay for, if need be, including:

• Notifying affected parties
• Resolving security issues
• Providing credit monitoring services for those impacted
• Extortion payments
• Expenses related to resuming your business practices
• Covering public relations costs

Who Needs Cyber Insurance?

To put it in no uncertain terms: any business that stores or handles sensitive information, whether that’s financial data, medical information, contact details, or personally identifiable information.

Don’t get us wrong, we don’t hope that you ever have a need for cyber insurance—we just know it is better to be prepared. Having said that, we’re also here to help minimize the chances that you’ll ever need it.

Reach out to us to learn more about our comprehensive cybersecurity services by calling (516) 403-9001.

Phishing attacks can be scary to deal with, especially since it is not unheard of for staff members to not even know they are looking at one. To make sure your staff can identify and respond to phishing attacks in an appropriate way, we’ve put together this short guide to help you along the way.

First, let’s go over what makes a phishing attack.

What is Phishing?

Phishing is one of the most common forms of cyberattacks used by criminals with goals ranging from stealing data to gaining access to an infrastructure. Essentially, a phishing attack is an attempt by a cybercriminal to communicate with your team members in hopes that they will give away important information or allow access to critical systems. Phishing attacks are a natural evolution of cyberattacks that rose in popularity due to the advancement of security standards; while solutions have grown stronger and more difficult to crack, the human mind remains ever-vulnerable.

Phishing emails are the most well-known type of phishing attack, but they also come in other forms, like online forms designed to harvest credentials, SMS messages with infected links, phone calls, and other means of communication. Since phishing attacks can take so many different forms, it’s important that your team knows what to look for in these attempts, as well as how to report them to your trusted IT administrator. 

Let’s go over some of the ways your team members can identify a potential phishing attack.

Signs That a Phishing Attack is Targeting You

There are plenty of warning signs you can use to identify a phishing attack. Here is a short list to consider, but if you have any concerns at all, we hope you will reach out to us at (516) 403-9001 to learn more about them:

• A tone that doesn’t match the supposed sender
• Misspellings and other discrepancies in key details, like email addresses, domain names, and links
• Out-of-the-blue messages
• Egregious spelling and grammar errors
• Unexpected or out-of-context attachments
• Excessive urgency behind, or open threats as a consequence of, not complying with the message
• Ambiguous messages that motivate the recipient to investigate
• Unusual requests, or requests for explicitly sensitive information

It’s incredibly important to know what these warning signs are so you can actively keep a lookout for them. If you don’t, who knows what could happen?

We’re Here to Help Keep Your Team Safe!

If you feel you could use some help keeping your business safe from phishing attacks, we are happy to help. To learn more, reach out to us at (516) 403-9001.

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.