I believe small businesses should have a plan for their IT. There will be differences between businesses for obvious reasons, but in large part there are some common key elements that make up a good IT plan for all small businesses. Here are the basics that a small business should have as part of their […]
A major Internet attack today (2016-10-21) affected popular Internet sites like Amazon, Netflix, Twitter, and more. The attack was a “distributed denial of service” (DDoS) attack, where a large number of devices, typically a botnet, are used to flood the targets with Internet traffic. The flood of traffic overwhelms the capacity of the targets and […]
Digital Trends has an article about a recent security breach that resulted in the loss of 58 million personal records. As if that’s not bad enough, the article claims nearly 3,000 reported security breaches so far in 2016 of 2.2 billion records. Those numbers are astronomical! And what’s more, it specifically says, “publicly disclosed” attacks. […]
This is another common IT myth. I’ve heard it many times, “I have an IT person, he’s got everything under control.” But think about that for a minute. In other complex industries like law or medicine. In those industries, there are generalists and specialists. Why? Because lawyers and doctors understand that they can’t possibly be […]
Previously, I posted about Internet devices like security cameras and DVRs being hacked to form a botnet army that was then used to launch attacks against other targets. [Internet Devices Get Hacked Too] I wanted to draw a link from this fact (that Internet devices of all kinds are susceptible to attack) to an earlier […]
In a Wall Street Journal article from Sep 30, 2016, author Drew Fitzgerald writes about recent attacks that were carried out by a botnet “army” against multiple targets including at least one each in the US and France. According to the article, as many as 1 million devices may have participated in the attack. The […]
In today’s society, you simply have to filter web content on your network. The risks of lawsuit, the cost of payroll, and the threat of virus and malware combine to mean it’s not an option. If you aren’t filtering web content, you’re asking for trouble. Let’s start with the simplest one: the cost of payroll. […]
Most small businesses don’t have effective IT. The IT that they do have is a hodge-podge of technologies, a mish-mash of computers, a lot of out-of-date practices, and a smattering of the technology-du-jour all held together with a heavy dose of superstition (“We don’t want to change that. Last time we did, everything broke.”) The […]