You’ve completed your annual phishing training. This includes teaching employees how to spot phishing emails. You’re feeling good about it. That is until about 5-6 months later. Your company suffers a costly ransomware infection due to a click on a phishing link. You wonder why you seem to need to train on the same information every year. But you still suffer from security incidents. The problem is that you’re not training your employees often enough. People can’t change behaviors if training isn’t reinforced. They can also easily forget what they’ve learned after several months go by. So, how often is…
The number of internet-connected devices in homes has been growing. It’s increased exponentially over the last decade. A typical home now has 10.37 devices connected to the internet. PCs and mobile devices make up a little over half of those and the rest are IoT devices. IoT stands for Internet of Things. It means any other type of “smart device” that connects online. IoT devices in a home can be everything from your streaming stick to your smart refrigerator. Smart baby monitors and Alexa voice assistants are also IoT. There’s also been another change that has happened over the last…
One of the big draws of a laptop computer is that you can use it anywhere. You don’t need to have it plugged in all the time because it has an internal battery. Your laptop may start out with several hours of battery life when you first buy it. But the lifespan can get shorter as time goes by and battery health takes a hit. Sometimes this can be due to a lack of PC maintenance. Other times, it’s due to the environments the laptop is subject to (such as a hot car). Seeing your laptop’s battery capacity shrink can…
“Hybrid office” is the new buzzword you’ll hear used in business discussions. It’s the mix of having employees both working at the office and working from home. This has become more than a buzzword and is now the reality for many companies. There was a survey of employees with remote-capable jobs. The survey found that as of February of 2022, 42% of them were working a hybrid schedule. And 39% were working from home full time. The global pandemic brought on this hybrid office transition. It forced companies to operate with teams that could no longer safely come to the…
Credential theft is now at an all-time high and is responsible for more data breaches than any other type of attack. With data and business processes now largely cloud-based, a user’s password is the quickest and easiest way to conduct many different types of dangerous activities. Being logged in as a user (especially if they have admin privileges) can allow a criminal to send out phishing emails from your company account to your staff and customers. The hacker can also infect your cloud data with ransomware and demand thousands of dollars to give it back. How do you protect your…
Smartphones and tablets are often the preferred device for communications, web searching, and accessing many types of apps. They’re more portable and can be used from anywhere. We’re seeing the takeover of many activities that used to be performed on traditional computers. Now, people are using mobile devices instead. For example, Microsoft estimates that up to 80% of the workload in many enterprise organizations is now done via mobile devices. Over half of all web searches are also now conducted from a mobile device rather than a desktop PC. This has caused mobile devices to become more targeted over the…
Approximately 34% of businesses take a week or longer to regain access to their data and systems once hit with a malware attack. Malware is an umbrella term that encompasses many different types of malicious code. It can include: Viruses Ransomware Spyware Trojans Adware Key loggers And more The longer that malware sits on your system unchecked, the more damage it can do. Most forms of malware have a directive built in to spread to as many systems as possible. So, if not caught and removed right away, one computer could end up infecting 10 more on the same network…
One of the most important applications we choose is our internet browser. When on a computer or a mobile device, we work in that most of the time because many applications are now cloud-based, so accessing them means going through your browser. Over the years browsers have come and gone. A little over a decade ago, Internet Explorer was the head of the pack, and now that browser is retired, Google’s Chrome has been in the top spot for several years. But just because a browser is number one today, doesn’t mean it’s going to stay that way. One browser…
While many companies have moved most of their workflows to the cloud, there is still a key component of office operations that is location-based. This would be employee computers. Most companies still rely on desktops and laptops to allow employees to access critical software and as their main workstation. This can become inconvenient if you’re doing work from one location. For example, if you work both at the office and home, in one of those places, you’ll be without your “main computer.” This can be a real problem when it comes to needing to access certain files or possibly working…
When you see those people with two monitors, you may assume they do some specialized work that requires all that screen space, or they just really like technology. But having the additional display real estate that a second screen provides can benefit anyone, even if you’re doing accounting or document work all day. We get used to being boxed in by the screen size we have. This can lead to us struggling when trying to fit two windows next to each other or continuously clicking between layers of windows on the desktop. Most of us have experienced clicking around to…
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