Accucom Blog

When it comes to your business’ security, your team members can either be your greatest vulnerability or your greatest strength. In order to ensure that the latter is the case, you need to make sure that they are all trained up in the proper security measures. For your convenience, we wanted to share a few tips to help make this training more effective.

When a hacker tries to access one of your accounts, the first challenge they must overcome is the password. This is why industry professionals always encourage you to create them with security in mind. The latest guidelines issued by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, or NIST, are not quite conventional or traditional, but they do give valuable insights into how to create more secure passwords.

Ransomware attacks are nothing new, but when was the last time they made headlines by instigating a gas crisis? A Russia-backed hacking collective called DarkSide targeted Colonial Pipeline, a company responsible for almost 45 percent of the fuel for the Southeastern United States, with a devastating ransomware attack. The attack led to a spike in fuel prices and spotty availability while also showing cracks in the nation’s energy infrastructure, and it has even sparked a renewed interest in cybersecurity.

Software is a critical part of your business. Without it, you would have to do everything manually. In fact, most businesses couldn’t do what they do without their software. That’s why it is so surprising that many businesses don’t actively patch their software. Let’s take a look at our patch management service and why it’s such a huge benefit. 

Cyberattacks are spending less time on their victims’ networks before they are discovered, which sounds like good news, but the reality isn’t so straightforward. Let’s take a few moments and dig into the situation at hand, and what it means for your cybersecurity.

We’ve all seen advertisements for the websites that offer to connect you with the professionals ready to help you with a specialized task around your home, from repair work to childcare to cleaning services. Unfortunately, cybercriminals have adopted a similar tactic to help market their services, leading to the creation of a sort of hackers’ gig economy on the Dark Web.

It’s a bit of a nightmare scenario for a business, born of watching too many crime thrillers: a criminal syndicate hacks into their systems, wreaking havoc and stealing all their data, while also destroying that company’s reputation. Is this scenario a fantasy? To a point, yes—but not so much as you might think.

Small businesses face a lot of risks, one obvious one being the threat of potential cybercrime and how its influence can impact their businesses. Let’s consider how these influences have taken shape, and the challenges that small and medium-sized businesses must now face as a result.

2020 offered no shortage of challenges for healthcare providers. Besides the obvious issues that COVID-19 posed to the operations, finances, and supply chains that these organizations rely on, cybersecurity issues have played a significant role. Let’s go over some of the security stresses that healthcare providers have been experiencing.

Your privacy on the Internet matters, even if you don’t think you have anything to hide. Over the last few years, this has become more and more evident as we watch tech giants profit off of understanding the people who use their services. Facebook, Amazon, and Google are among them. Google in particular has made some recent policy changes that are worth understanding.

People look at their work differently, just as they view their lives differently. The many different perspectives of your staff brings a bit of variance of how they view data security. This isn’t so good for your business as you need to trust them to prioritize the security of your data and infrastructure. Let’s take a look at some of the best practices that you should be training your staff in, which will allow them to protect your data better, and theirs. 

Conferencing has played a crucial role for businesses, and never more than in the past year. Unfortunately, this has presented the opportunity for trolls to join in these remote collaboration efforts, interrupting them with inflammatory and vulgar content. Labelled “Zoombombing”, these attacks have led to the implementation of numerous privacy protections and countermeasures… but the question remains: how effectively do these protections defend a business’ efforts?

As a study has revealed, not effectively enough.

As the preeminent form of security online, passwords are currently the most important frontline defense to get right in your organization. However, many people often cut corners with their passwords to ensure they don’t forget them, recycling them across their many accounts. Let’s go over a few ways to help your team create secure passwords that they can commit to memory without shortchanging their efficacy.

Your software is an important, even crucial, part of your business’ security considerations. After all, a software title with security issues could be the access point that hackers and scammers need. This is precisely why software updates and security patches are so important to keep up on. Let’s consider this in a little more detail.

If I were to ask you what you believed was the biggest potential threat to your business’ future, what would your answer be? The correct answer for most is the risk that an employee might let in a threat—intentionally or not. Let’s investigate how this might happen, and what you need to do to stop it.

We will often keep an eye on current events to find practical examples to use as evidence in support of our recommended best practices, but a relatively recent Spotify hack has given us a special opportunity. We now have the opportunity to use this one story to reinforce not one, but two such practices. Let’s dive in, shall we?

It was pretty evident from the start of the COVID-19 pandemic that many businesses were not prepared to pivot their operations offsite. Many of these company’s leaders spent the past several years convinced that allowing people to work remotely would sap productivity in unsustainable ways. Cybercriminals have taken advantage of many organizations since then. Today, we will talk about what needs to be done to secure your endpoints when supporting a remote workforce. 

Adobe Flash, once one of the most utilized pieces of software on the Internet is being retired by the software giant. Support will stop on December 31, 2020 and like any other piece of retired software, you should remove it from any systems you have that still run it. 

With so many people working from home right now, businesses have managed to keep their operations going somewhat successfully by using the remote solutions that are available today. While it is fortunate that today’s technology enables businesses to do so, the importance of cybersecurity cannot be understated as remote work is implemented.

We haven’t exactly been shy about sharing our recommendation that a ransomware demand should never be met with payment, but there is now an even more impactful reason not to. This deterrent comes courtesy of the United States Treasury Department, which has released a statement informing businesses of potential fines as retribution for doing so.