Managed Service Provider Blog Articles and Best Practices

I’m not sure we need to tell you how important passwords are: they are the front-line defense to most of the accounts you create. What is often overlooked is the strategy of how to use a password to successfully protect accounts and data. Today, we will discuss best practices   when creating and managing your passwords and how you are likely approaching your password strategy improperly. 

Creating Strong Passwords 

It’s true that passwords can be a pain to manage. Anyone who has been locked out of an account because they can’t remember their password knows this all too well. That’s why it is important to create passwords that are both easy to remember and that are secure enough to protect you. Cybercriminals have tools at their disposal that do a pretty good job of being able to crack passwords, so you need to keep that in mind when you are choosing yours. 

As you set out to create your passwords, you should keep the following two points of emphasis in mind. 

1. A hacker may try to brute force attack any password that cannot be guessed or cracked, rapidly trying each combination possible.
2. A password’s security and its resistance to brute force attacks are two different things.

Brute force attacks can really be devastating, but when you create your passwords, you have to keep in mind that any hacker with the will to brute force your computing network and left with the time to complete their hack, will likely find a way into your network. What you are doing when you are selecting a strong, memorable password is trying to make certain that the only way they are cracking your password is through brute force.

Typically we like to encourage that your passwords meet the following metrics:

• Are longer, typically over 16 characters
• Use a combination of numerals, letters (with upper and lower case characters), and symbols
• Don’t use privileged or personal information, or any information that can be tied to you through online searches
• No common words or numbers
• No consecutive letters or numbers

So How Do You Optimize Your Password’s Effectiveness?

With those practices, you will be pretty far along, but you also have to understand that the hackers’ tools are extremely powerful. That’s why on top of those suggestions, you will also want to add some complexity to your passwords. Studies have shown that about 41 percent of all passwords are composed exclusively of lowercase letters. If we have access to this information, it stands to reason that someone who makes a living breaking into networks and stealing data knows it as well. Therefore, along with adding symbols, varying cases, and numerals, one strategy is to use a passphrase of random words. 

The reason for this is that, with a password that looks like this “7i&3RkIn&4L1f3” the chances that you remember it if you use the account sparingly is pretty low. Besides, it is not that secure, as it is effectively a complex sentence. Remember, the hacker has to get your password completely correct to effectively gain access, so instead of trying to come up with intricate ways of typing statements that can be easily guessed, try taking three words that don’t have any natural connection, incorporating numbers and some varying capitalization, and padding either side with symbols.

A process like this makes the password more usable. It very likely won’t be guessed, is long enough to protect your account, is effective against the brute force attack, and will be easier for you to remember. 

Speaking of which, since you shouldn’t use the same password for multiple accounts, you will end up with dozens of passwords. Keeping them straight, especially over the long haul (as you will likely have to reset passwords from time to time), is difficult. That’s why we recommend using a password manager. Many people take advantage of the password saving feature inside their browser. This is effective, but we recommend using a third-party manager that features encryption. This tool will be the most secure and reliable; and, you won’t have to worry about remembering every password. 

At MSPNetworks, we consider cybersecurity one of the most important parts of a business’ IT strategy. Give us a call a (516) 403-9001 to see how we can help you keep your IT assets safe. 

Your business’ security largely depends on how secure the passwords are that keep your resources from being accessed without authorization. Despite this, many users—perhaps even you—frequently sacrifice sufficient security measures in favor of the simple and convenient route, cutting corners when coming up with their passwords. Let’s try and remedy this by reviewing a few practices that can help make a password more effective.

What Threats are There to Passwords?

A password can be undermined in one of two different ways, generally speaking:

Digging into your online life or resorting to trickery, a “bad actor” (as they are sometimes called) figures out your password or how they can fool you into handing it over. Alternatively, the bad actor might phish you or infect your computer to crack the password.

As a result, you need to figure out how to make your passwords effectively guess-proof, while still being able to recall them as you need them. These principles should ultimately pertain to any passwords associated with your business—including the ones your staff members rely on.

The Balance Between a Strong Password and a Memorable Password

Whether you’re designing a password policy for your company members to follow, or simply creating a new account of your own, there are two important considerations to keep in mind.

• If a hacker can’t guess/crack a password, they will likely resort to a brute force method—simply trying every combination possible until they eventually get a hit.
• The security of a password and its resilience against brute force attacks aren’t the same.

It is important that both of these aspects are taken into serious account as you come up with your passwords.

How to Optimize Your Password Security

There are a few widely accepted best practices when it comes to what makes a good password:

• It is sufficiently long, ideally stretching over 16 characters
• These characters include non-consecutive numbers, letters, and symbols
• The password contains no common words or numbers, private information, or any publicly accessible details

It is also important that your considerations involve the aforementioned tools that cybercriminals use to break password protections. This is where we must account for the complexity of your passwords.

Did you know that about 40 percent of passwords only contain lowercase letters? Well, cybercriminals certainly know, and will certainly try to save time by only trying lowercase letters in their initial brute force attacks. Even one extra variable can significantly increase the password’s security, making it harder and more time-consuming for the hacker, and possibly convincing them that the effort isn’t worth it.

However, you also need a password that is memorable enough for you to be able to use it. The most secure password in the world is no good to you if you can’t commit it to memory, to the letter (or number or symbol).

This has recently led to the idea that a password composed of a few random words, randomized further with alphanumeric substitution and capitalization, padded with repeating symbols on either side, is the most secure option.

Think about it—like we said, each variable makes the hacker’s job that much more challenging and can help slow down any automated attempts long enough for the hacker to abandon them.

With all this in mind, it makes sense to create passwords that ultimately look something like this:

====p33k,,,@ss0c!@t3d,,,p0ck3t====

Not only is this password effectively impossible to guess, but it also has plenty of characters and—while designed to be somewhat simple to memorize, is still plenty resistant to brute force methods. Just make sure you come up with your own, instead of copying this one.

Remembering These Passwords

Admittedly, a password like this is a lot to remember on its own, so the thought of remembering a different one for each account (in keeping with best practices) can be daunting for most. Fortunately, a password manager can simplify this considerably.

A password manager is basically just a piece of software that safely and securely stores your passwords away for you, accessible to you behind a single master password. That way, your passwords could be totally secure and unique without forcing you to remember them all.

From your passwords and access management to every other aspect of your business’ IT security and productivity, MSPNetworks is here to help. Learn more about what we can offer by calling (516) 403-9001 today.

The modern business has to deal with a lot of potential security problems. Today’s threat landscape is filled with people looking to prosper off of your misfortune. As a result, doing what you can to maintain the security of your network and data is essential. Today, we will discuss how maintaining your organizational cybersecurity doesn’t have to be costly or time consuming.The best way we’ve found to go about doing this is by highlighting a few key actions that you can take to keep your network secure and your data safe.

Use Strong Passwords

Like many of these quick tips, this one is a good practice regardless of where you are. Good password management is an extremely important part of the security process. To concoct a good password, you need to first make something that people or computer programs won’t guess. You can do that by using both lower- and upper-case letters, numbers, and symbols.

Another good practice is to create a passphrase of unlike words. This serves two purposes. First, it ensures that you can remember the password; and, secondly it is secure enough where no one can crack the password.

Finally, you will want to create a unique password for every online account and save them in an encrypted password manager. Doing so will not only protect your passwords, it sets up a system where you only have to remember one. 

For additional security, you will want to use two-factor authentication. This is a system that adds an additional layer of security to your online accounts. Once you enter a password into a password manager, you then will get an additional box where you will enter a code. This code can be sent through email or it can be generated through an authentication app. 

Only Use Secure Wi-Fi

The Wi-Fi inside your office should be secure, hidden, and encrypted. For those times when working in your office is impossible, the use of a virtual private network (VPN) can keep your uploads and downloads secure. Utilizing public Wi-Fi without a VPN is just asking for problems. 

Some VPNs are better than others. Typically, if your company uses a comprehensive network security suite for your office, it will come with VPN licenses that will be more than enough to protect data transmission when you are working on someone else’s Wi-Fi.

Avoid Unknown Links

Phishing is the number one way that hackers gain access to a network. This is because people click on links and download attachments that they have no business interacting with. Your account has likely been phished many times this year. Most are probably thwarted by your spam blocker, but it only takes one attack to grind productivity to a halt.

If we have one piece of advice, don’t enter personal or company information in an email or instant message unless you are very clear who is on the other end. The threats that line up against your integrated security are substantial ones. Phishing is the number one cause of identity theft and ransomware. Since it runs the entire gamut of negative results, ensuring that you are doing what you can to not be part of the problem is important. 

Cybersecurity can be difficult for a business, but an individual’s role in protecting business and personal networks isn’t. If you would like to learn more about IT security or how to effectively manage risks that come from phishing and other attacks, subscribe to our blog today.

In the business world, productivity is everything, which means that many will try to boost their productivity however they can. Many swear by multitasking, or the practice of juggling tasks to keep themselves fresh and productive. However, evidence shows they are mistaken. We’ll go into why, and offer a few more effective alternatives.

The Fallacy of Multitasking
Many people believe that multitasking is the art of working on two things simultaneously. You may even be one of these people. If so, I have some bad news for you: multitasking is a myth.

Seriously, it doesn’t exist. Let’s try a brief experiment. Start fiddling with something on your desk as you read this blog:

The human brain isn’t wired to work that way, no matter what you might believe. It isn’t that men or women are better at it, or younger people are more practiced at it… it just isn’t a thing, at least, not in the way a lot of people interpret it.

When you ask someone what multitasking is, they’ll probably summarize it as some variation of “doing multiple things at once.” The problem is, science has shown that the human brain literally doesn’t work that way - it is designed to commit to a singular cognitive task at a time. What is perceived as “multitasking” is simply the brain switching from one task to another.

One of the reasons we’re so inclined to defend our multitasking habits is because we appear to see so many examples of it in real life. After all, Billy Joel made an entire career out of singing and playing the piano at the same time, didn’t he? It also feels good to multitask, quite literally. As we “multitask,” we’re likely switching between many, bite-sized tasks. Between checking email, updating social media, planning where to go for lunch, and all the other easy decisions we make everyday, there’s a release of dopamine.

This hormone is the brain’s reward for a job well done… and it wants more.

Due to this, we are spurred to continue jumping from mini-task to mini-task, and we feel like we’re accomplishing a lot (when we really aren’t). This is why social media can be so addictive, and why so many of us compulsively check our emails.

Why This Doesn’t Work
There are assorted reasons that multitasking isn’t exactly good for our productivity, or even our physical well-being.

Multitasking isn’t actually any more productive.
In fact, your tasks can ultimately wind up taking longer.

Let’s say that you need to accomplish two tasks, A and B, which take 45 minutes and 90 minutes respectively, or 135 minutes, or 2 hours and 15 minutes in total. Now, consider how these tasks would break up if we multitasked and switched between each task every 15 minutes and 30 minutes, respectively.

You get to work on task A, and then B, and then A again, switching back and forth until each task is completed. Since multitasking doesn’t make you work any faster, you still take 135 minutes to complete both tasks. Strike one against multitasking.

Now, for strike two, let’s examine how these tasks would have progressed during that time. Doing these tasks one at a time would mean that A would be done in 45 minutes and B done 90 minutes after that, totaling 2 hours and 15 minutes.

Multitasking, on the other hand, changes things. If you switch between them the way we established above, by the time the 45 minute mark rolled around, you’d have only worked on task A for 15 minutes and B for 30, meaning that each would only be one-third done in the same amount of time it would take to complete one task if focusing on it exclusively. Continuing this pattern, instead of completing A in 45 minutes, you’d be done with it by minute 105, a full hour later than it would have been finished otherwise.

Multitasking stresses us out.
Switching our trains of thought so violently is exhausting, much like most anything violent tends to be. This is largely because switching tasks in such a fashion encourages the production of cortisol in the brain, otherwise known as the stress hormone. More specifically, cortisol is the stress hormone that lingers for extended periods of time in the body, as opposed to short-term hormones like epinephrine and norepinephrine (which are what trigger the ‘fight or flight’ response). As a result, not only are we tiring out our brains, reducing our ability to handle stress, we are actively producing the hormone that produces it.

As if that wasn’t bad enough, that’s hardly the half of it:

Multitasking is actually bad for the brain.
Research has repeatedly shown that attempting to multitask could potentially be the source of assorted mental health issues, or at least have some correlation to them. For one, multitasking can greatly diminish cognitive abilities. One study demonstrated that multitasking dropped the IQ scores of adult subjects enough to bring them to the level of an eight-year-old, much like a sleepless night has been shown to do.

It gets worse - other studies have shown that there is an association between multitasking habits and a less dense area in the brain called the anterior cingulate cortex. This area is responsible for a few key human functions: empathy, as well as cognitive and emotional control capabilities. While the jury is still out on whether multitasking causes this damage, or those with the lack of brain density are simply more prone to multitask, neither is a good sign for the habit.

Furthermore, in addition to one’s intelligence quotient, one’s multitasking habits have also been shown to stunt one’s EQ as well, or their emotional intelligence. EQ covers key considerations in the office environment, including awareness of oneself and social relationships. Testing the EQ levels of over a million people, emotional intelligence training firm TalentSmart found that over 90% of industry performers have high EQs.

In short, multitasking actually makes our capacity to do quality work suffer, as our stamina, cognition, and memory are all affected. Without peeking, can you remember which musical artist was referenced earlier in this blog? If you can’t, is it possible you may have been multitasking?

The Difference
The reference, by the way, was to Billy Joel’s ability to sing and play piano at the same time. However, this isn’t multitasking in his case (or in many other cases). He has simply learned to sing and play the piano as a single skill, not to sing while he plays the piano… see the difference?

Fortunately, like any habit, multitasking can eventually be broken through the adoption of better, healthier habits. These habits include:

Avoiding Free Time: Or, in other words, resisting the urge to dive into another project while you’re waiting for a response on one you’re currently working on. This may feel like a squandered opportunity to be productive, but you need to remember the example we went over above: switching back and forth restricts progress from being made on either task in a timely fashion.

This is not to say, of course, that you should sit and wait until you get a response for hours on end.

Instead, you should take the moment to run through your project and evaluate where it stands. Is it set to accomplish what it is supposed to? Once you’ve spent some time doing that, you might consider moving on to something new, but only so long as you resolve to drop it the instant your original task can resume.

Communicate With Your Team: Let’s face it, the majority of your work distractions are going to come from others within your organization, or at least other business matters. Your productivity will require you to discourage and/or ignore these distractions. Whether you communicate to your team your intentions before you begin a task or simply put on a pair of headphones (music or white noise optional) to discourage interaction, make sure you communicate that you are unavailable at the given time.

Disconnect: On a related note, try minimizing the other distractions that may come in. Email, for all its benefits, is a notorious source of distractions in the office. The best approach is to silence your email notifications if at all possible, and schedule out set times to check your inbox. If someone really needs to contact you, they’ll find another way to do so. Your mobile device works the same way: the compulsion to peek at it can be considerable.

However, each time we do, there goes our focus. Unless you’re expecting a truly urgent call, power down your phone and keep it stashed away, out of sight. You may be surprised by how much can be accomplished without the interruptions or temptations.

Getting Organized: There’s a reason that people use to-do lists: they are effective. By mapping out your goals for the day and arranging them by priority, you will be able to accomplish more - especially if you schedule brief breaks periodically throughout the day. By remaining mindful throughout your process, you will be able to better focus on what you need to accomplish, rather than the distractions around you. These habits will help you instill a predisposition to monotasking, multitasking’s more effective cousin.

As its name suggests, monotasking is the full dedication of your time to a single task until no more progress can be made on it. Monotasking enables tasks to be completed more efficiently and effectively, ultimately bringing greater progress towards your goals.

However, just because you can’t multitask, doesn’t mean your technology can’t.

MSPNetworks can help you implement solutions with automation capabilities, giving your team less to worry about and less to take their focus away from their productivity. Call us at (516) 403-9001 to learn more.