Broadcasting your password on national television may be the easiest way to invite hackers, but common password mistakes make it almost as easy for your data security to be compromised.

Password safety may not be one of the most interesting topics in the realm of cybersecurity, but having a strong password is one of the easiest ways to protect your business’ data integrity. The importance of a robust password has been emphasized by many experts, yet often users who think that they are utilizing a secure password are actually opening themselves up to attacks. You may not be broadcasting your password on national television, but if your password falls into one of the following categories, you could be just as vulnerable to hackers.

Short and Simple

Short, simple passwords may be easy to remember, but they are also easy to guess. In general, the longer a password is, the harder it is for hackers to break it. Each additional character that you add to your password increases the possible combination of letters, numbers and symbols exponentially. Remember that hackers tend to go after low-hanging fruit, so any steps that you take to make your password harder to crack increases the likelihood that someone trying to break in will move on to the next target instead.

Lacking in Numbers or Symbols

Letters-only passwords may be more intuitive for you–but they are for hackers as well. Just as adding additional characters to your password exponentially increases the number of the possible combinations, so does using numbers and symbols in addition to letters. Just think about it: using letters, symbols and numbers means that each character in your password has almost twice as many options as if you only use letters.

Based on Personal Information

As highlighted in the clip from Jimmy Kimmel Live, using personal information such as a pet’s name or a birthday is incredibly common. Including personal details in your password, however, makes you very vulnerable to hacking. You may think that “Fido111379” is secure and difficult to guess, but blog posts discussing your dog or Facebook comments wishing you a happy birthday can broadcast your personal details to anyone who cares enough to look for them.

Simplistic Patterns

Being able to remember your password is, of course, necessary and utilizing a pattern might seem to be an easy solution to commit it to memory. Complex patterns that use letters, numbers and symbols within a long password are not a security risk. However, most people who use patterns in their password rely on overly simplistic ones, and this makes you vulnerable to hackers, particularly if your password is short. One particular type of pattern that you must avoid is keyboard-based patterns, such as “123qwe” or “1qaz2wsx.”

Worried that your business’ data might be vulnerable to hackers? The experts at {city}’s {company} can help you evaluate your security procedures to see if you have any glaring holes. Contact us today at {phone} or {email} to learn more.

Used by permission

Criminals want your company’s financial data, customer lists including credit card information, intellectual property, and anything else they can sell.

Cyber crime is a huge endeavor with severe consequences for organizations that are victimized. Criminals want your company’s financial data, customer lists including credit card information, intellectual property, and anything else they can sell.

Besides the immediate impact on your business’ ability to operate (for example ransomware can shut you down), there are significant costs associated with a data breach. These costs include:

• Potential fines from regulatory agencies for failure to protect personal identification data (PI) or personal financial information (for example a credit card number). Some fines have been in million dollar multiples.
• The cost of notifying all persons and businesses that had their data breached.
• Costs of providing credit monitoring and identity theft protection for all involved.
• The potential cost of defending a class action lawsuit against your company for failure to adequately protect sensitive information.
• Loss of customers
• Loss of business reputation
• Inability to attract new customers or clients

Following are Best Practices for securing your computer system and company data.

Best Practices for Computer System Protection

The following list is the Best Practices for keeping your business’ computer system, programs, and data, safe from prying eyes.

1. Make sure your firewall is on so that intruders cannot access your system from the internet.
2. Install security software and keep it updated.
3. Filter all email for computer viruses.
4. The more popular a program used by your business is, the more appealing it is a target for cyber criminals. Criminals know that many users do not regularly patch their programs against malware infections, so popular programs give them a wider pool for targeting. Make sure that your computer programs are updated as soon as a security patch is released.
5. Exercise caution when using free 3^rd party software claiming they check for software updates. Free software may be bundled with malicious software.
6. Instruct employees that they should never open emails from unknown senders since they might be a source of infection to your company’s computer system. Attached malware might be anything from a virus to ransomware.
7. Tell your employees they should check with senders they know if an email has a suspicious attachment. A phone call to the sender can help avoid the consequences of a data breach.
8. Inform employees they should not open websites they are not familiar with and they should make sure the address bar is the site they want to visit. A random click could take them to a website that is just waiting to download malware onto your company computer system.
9. Buy your software from a reputable buyer and never use pirated software as it may be infected with malware.
10. Before using thumb drives and other portable media, scan them with security software to ensure they are virus free.

Computer security may surpass your company’s IT capabilities. Accordingly, consider a computer managed services provider with a strong background in computer security. For more information about managed services and how an MSP can help your company contact {company} in {city}. {phone} or contact us by {email}.

Microsoft recently released Microsoft Teams, billing it as a direct competitor to Slack for organizations seeking a cost-effective collaboration tool. How do the two platforms compare?

No matter the size of your team, and whether they work in the office or off-site, collaboration tools are a necessity for so many projects today. With G Suite, Redbooth, Slack, Trello, and more the possibilities seem endless when it comes to finding the right collaboration tools.

Slack channels in particularly have been a tremendously popular choice for communicating remotely. Organizations of all sizes have gravitated to Slack as it operates on a “freemium” model that allows users with smaller budgets to use its most basic functions while offering paying users of various calibers more choices. However, Microsoft is now trying to up the ante on Slack by rolling out Microsoft Teams.

In deciding which option is best for your team, here’s how Teams and Slack compare in the major areas of cost, features, UX design, and third-party integration.

Cost

Slack’s free mode is what made it so famous in the first place, giving users the option to upgrade if they need more features. Microsoft Teams does not offer a free basic version to try out which puts it out of reach for smaller organizations who want to give it a try without disrupting workflow. However, Teams is relatively easy to integrate if the organization is already a Microsoft user and not relying on a free office solution like Open Office.

Slack currently has about 4 million daily active users, with roughly 25% of them being paid members. It costs slightly more than Teams as pricing starts at approximately $6.67 per user while the former starts at $5 per user.

Features

Both Teams and Slack offer mention alerts as well as emojis threaded replies for easy reading. If you need to conduct a poll, Teams has a built-in tool while Slack requires a plug-in.

Video conferencing is made simple with both Teams and Slack. Teams offer built-in Skype integration within chat rooms while Slack’s video chat is built-in, but multi-video chat is only available to paying users.

Teams are also available in 18 languages while Slack is only in English.

UX Design and Navigation

Navigation is tabbed in both tools, but Teams has tabs for activity, chat, teams, meetings, and files which makes organizing multiple projects a little easier. Slack has tabs for teams, channels, direct messages, and private groups which can make managing multiple projects more confusing to navigate even if you’re a paying user.

For colors and themes, Teams offers only three of them while Slack has a very long list of different themes. Teams have a custom meme and sticker editor while Slack has meme bot integration.

Ultimately, Teams only allows members who are also registered with Teams to be added to yours while Slack will let anyone with an invitation join.

Security

While both tools support two-factor authentification, both also have a history of breaches/compromised accounts. Since Teams only allows users from inside the team, this may be considered an additional security precaution. Teams also have essential data leakage prevention while Slack does not.

Integration

Slack is integrated with Google Drive and over 750 other third party apps and tools, even Office 365 through Zapier. Teams are only combined with 150 apps but works seamlessly with other Office 365 products.

All in all, both Teams and Slack are robust collaboration solutions that offer cost-effective options and different features about your organization’s needs and your preferences. Slack may be a preferable option starting out if you have a very limited budget, with the option to upgrade if you need more features and team members. Teams offers superior security but haven’t been without breaches. It is also limited in that only users who are team members are allowed to collaborate on projects, making it ideal for organizations that have more established teams and projects with longer duration where turnover is less likely.

Slack ultimately offers the most integration with third-party apps, but if your team relies heavily on Office 365 products, Teams will be easiest to work with as it doesn’t need Zapier to integrate seamlessly.

The number of security issues and malware risks that your company must contend with continues to grow every year, but one of the most potentially devastating threats that your business faces is surprisingly low-tech in nature. Spoofed emails don’t rely on complex ransomware or sophisticated keystroke loggers. Instead, your company’s bank account and sensitive information are at risk simply by your employees attempting to perform their job duties. Training your team to spot spoofed emails is key to avoiding falling victim to common scams.

What types of spoofed e-mail scams are out there?

Examples of two common types of spoofed email scams played out in recent weeks. The first, an instance of the CEO fraud, involved an Internet criminal passing himself off as the head of a small Kansas construction company. The fraudster pretended to be the CEO of Cornejo & Sons and emailed the finance department of Sedgwick County to request $566,000 in payment. Because the county actually owed the construction company money for services rendered, they submitted payment as directed–only to later find out that the payment request hadn’t come from Cornejo & Sons and the construction company never received any funds.

A similar scam aimed at a Wyoming hospital system sought to obtain employees’ W2 forms. In this case, the Internet fraudster posed as an internal executive at Campbell County Health and requested the W2 files for all staff from the hospital group’s finance department. The finance department complied, exposing the hospital’s 1,300 employees to potential tax return fraud.

Can you and your staff spot a spoofed e-mail?

No longer completely confident that your employees won’t fall victim to one of these commonly spoofed e-mail scams? Luckily, there are steps that you can take to train your staff to spot a spoofed e-mail. Conducting training sessions to alert your employees to the existence of such scams is an important first step. Putting in place internal practices to verify the veracity of any request before responding will also help your employees understand how to deal with any potential scam emails that your business receives.

However, some employees don’t understand the real threat that accompanies spoofed emails until they have actually been the recipient of a fake request. For this reason, some businesses choose to initiate a simulated attack to reveal to their employees firsthand how easy it is to become the victim of a spoofed email. Some services exist that make it easy to carry out a pretend to attack. Some of these services such as PhishMe allow you to target the attack to match the real threat each of your employees is likely to face, such as an email sent to marketing asking them to provide their SharePoint credentials. Experts assert that it is fundamental to follow any simulated attack with further training as your employees will be particularly receptive to in-depth lessons on avoiding spoofed emails after falling for your staged attack.

Concerned that your employees might be vulnerable to spoofed emails? The security experts at {company} can help you discover your business’ weak spots. Contact us today at {phone} or {email} to learn more.

Contact us today at {phone} or {email} to learn more.

Microsoft released new custom data visualization tools for Power BI. Learn how your business can gain actionable insight with Power BI.

Microsoft has done it again. In March they introduced a new product to their office store called Power BI custom visuals. If you haven’t seen it yet, these are a set of powerful visual tools that will help you create actionable insight from even the most incomprehensible data. These new tools are free to Power BI users.

The beauty of Microsoft is that they are determined to make their software accessible to even the smallest business. Traditional business analytics and intelligence tools used to be available to enterprise organizations that could afford the hefty upfront costs of on-premise installations.

But the cloud has been the great equalizer, allowing the small to mid-size business access to the same business analytics software as big industry players. Today you can download tools like Power BI custom visuals to add impact to your reports. Let’s look at the potential impact of the release of Power BI custom visuals on your business.

Customized Visualizations Add Business Intelligence

If you haven’t started using Power BI, you’re missing something special. BI stands for business intelligence – and that is exactly what this suite of products aims to provide. Power BI was designed by Microsoft to give you data analytics tools to change the way you make business decisions. Power BI launches from a customizable dashboard that gives you a 360-view of the metrics that are important to your business. Because this product is cloud-based, you’ll see a real-time snapshot of data.

You can access this dashboard from anywhere you have a digital connection. This feature-rich software allows you to not only capture and analyze relevant data, it allows the creation of custom reports that collate data from multiple disparate databases.

But it’s the power of how you visualize and present this data that is particularly important. In your business model, you probably have a variety of internal and external stakeholders that could benefit from the visual presentation of important metrics on company performance. All the data in the world will mean nothing if you don’t create and communicate insight from the patterns it produces. That’s the “intelligence” in BI – and Power BI custom visuals helps you discern meaning from the data and then apply it to your daily business decisions.

Here are some of our favorite examples of the custom visuals Power BI offers:

• Correlation Plot can help you spot the interconnections between multiple data points. Instead of slicing and dicing multiple data points to figure out correlations, you can visually plot data and look for clues. Bubble charts are helpful in showing relationships between numerical values. This could be useful in spotting market trends across demographic segments.
• SandDance was created to let users see both the forest – and the trees. It takes data and displays it as points on a map. You can take many individualized records and then organize them in groups to create insight. You can even display this data in 3-D. These are touch-based displays; you can drag and drop data at the touch of your fingers. It’s easy to use and visually very interesting, with smooth transitions between views to keep your presentation cohesive.
• Word Cloud looks for frequent words in text or spreadsheets and turns them into a clever graphical image. With Word Cloud, you can forget tediously digging through big amounts of text to highlight the most frequently used words. This software does it for you, finding the themes behind the data. You can also change the appearance of the word cloud by making it larger or smaller, adding rotation, along with other fun features.

It’s important to note that Microsoft customers and the company itself created these tools. This goes to the heart of the open source movement; the source codes from these tools are available and able to be modified. This allows users to make changes to fit their business or simply to improve upon the product. This accessibility benefits everyone – including your business.

These tools can help your business in so many ways. You can:

• Use data to tell your story
• Build evidence-based cases or theories
• Test ideas and hypotheses
• Go beyond surface explanations to actually understand the “why” behind the data
• Support purchase decisions
• Spot customer or market trends
• Look for correlations or causes
• Carve out specific data subsets
• Give broader context to data pockets
• Create actionable insight

Contact {company} at {email} or {phone} to find out how businesses in {city} can benefit from Microsoft’s Power BI products.