This week, the Washingon Post reported a fascinating story on how “organized cyber-gangs in Eastern Europe are increasingly preying on small and mid-size companies in the United States.” They appear to be targeting small businesses for the simple reason that they are easier nuts to crack than large financial institutions.
This week, at a client’s request, I am reviewing their entire telecommunications spending. I decided to look at four different vendors to compare their offerings. The first one I looked at was AT&T, to see if they had a comparable long distance package.
We sometimes get support requests from frustrated clients who are in some way prevented from accomplishing a task because of system security policies. Unfortunately, they sometimes think that we have done this deliberately to make their job difficult. One of my jobs as a security professional is to explain to my clients just what security […]
I frequently hear security professionals and pundits proclaim that such and such a technology “is dead.” Lately, I’ve heard that “antivirus is dead,” “Intrusion Prevention Systems (IPS) are dead.” A while back it was “firewalls are dead,” and “SSL is dead.” People who utter phrases like this are doing a disservice to the security community.
Electronic greetings cards are a fad that, sadly, has not yet passed and is still quite popular. These things are bad for several reasons, which I’ll outline in today’s post.
If you have a Microsoft Exchange server at your business, Microsoft Outlook has the ability to access more than one mailbox at a time. This is a useful feature if multiple users need to share access to the same email address, or if someone needs to cover another person’s email (when an auto-responder won’t suffice) […]
“Unified Threat Management” is a buzzphrase (that is, a few buzzwords strung together) heard a lot in networking and network security. Essentially, this is something (usually a device) which combines several network security services, including email filtering, web content filtering, firewalling, intrusion detection/prevention, and others. A UTM device can provide other services as well, such […]
Last week, I posted an article explaining why security is everyone’s concern. Today I came across another article which underscores this. The Zeus botnet apparently self-destructed last month, effectively rendering 100,000 computers across the Internet non-functional.
When I first mention information security to a client, particularly a small business, non-profit, or educational institution, I frequently get a response like this: “Nobody is interested in our network.” “We don’t have anything that anyone would want.” “Our systems aren’t that important.” “No one would steal my account/password/login.” “Why would someone want to hack […]
For many small to mid-sized businesses that have their own on-site e-mail server, it is a common practice to use a router and a single public Internet address (the one given to them as part of the basic business-level DSL or cable Internet package) to serve their entire network. Behind this router sits the e-mail […]