One of the biggest challenges of businesses nowadays, be it small, medium, or a large corporation, is keeping their business information safe from various types of hackers who seek to wreck havoc and often benefit from stealing business data that is why it has become a necessity for business owners to hire IT services teams to keep their business running smoothly and to protect their business information from being stolen by scrupulous individuals.
In the past, business owners’ security concern were about keeping their office spaces and assets within safe. They only had to put up cameras and hire guards to keep the business premises safe but that was before businesses started to connect to the internet for faster business growth and bigger profits. Businesses still have guards and security teams in the work place of course, but not all of them have IT services teams that stand guard against the growing number of cyber criminals and cyber attacks who need not step into an office building to be able to steal valuable business information.
Members of IT services teams do their best to maintain and monitor business systems and networks to keep business computers and gadgets on tip top shape and to prevent security breaches but a significant number of IT concerns are caused by human error so it is best to educate ourselves and our staff on what to watch out for. Arm yourself and your staff with what has been going on in the tech world lately so you can help your IT services group in keeping your business networks and IT systems safe from cyber attacks.
Hacking Here, There, And Everywhere
There has been nonstop news of hacking these past few weeks. Tumbler was hacked back in 2013 but we only heard about it recently. 65 million encrypted passwords and email addresses were stolen in the mentioned data breach. The information was put up for sale later on but Tumbler says that the data was encrypted so they do not believe that the information would be of use to the hacker but they still advised Tumbler users to do immediate password modifications.
News about the sale of 360 million user information of Myspace being sold on the dark web also came out shortly after the Tumbler hack. LinkedIn, Twitter, and even dating sites like Beautiful People and Fling have also been targeted by cyber criminals. Twitter’s information security head, Michael Coates, says that the claims of a certain Russian hacker who was said to be selling nearly 380 million Twitter account information is not true, and that the information did not come from a breach of their systems but they have locked an undisclosed number of accounts which will require a password reset for users to gain access to the said accounts. Infamous people like Katy Perry’s and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg’s accounts on Twitter were indeed hacked.
Why should business owners and their staff be aware of social networks and dating sites being hacked you ask? Because there is high level of certainty that most of your staff members have social networking accounts and some may even be members of the breached dating sites. Your IT services team may have kept your systems up to date and installed all the programs to ensure protection but online criminals who may have gotten hold of your information from the dating site and social network security breaches can use your personal information to get into your business systems.
By now, your IT services group may have already warned you about phishing sites where digital deviants create a fake website that looks so much like the original to fool people into typing in their username and password information. This hacker modus operandi is easier for your IT services team to thwart because they can install filters to prevent such websites from being opened but there are other ways that personal information procured from social networking sites can be used by hackers. Another way would be spoofing your email address, or email addresses of business executives to fool staff who deal with fund transfers or deliveries to sending payments to hacker accounts.
A dependable IT services team can also establish internal email filters that would flat emails with words like “transfer” and “payment” to be able to observe any email anomalies but it is best to establish a better confirmation (like verbal or personal approval) with your staff. A good IT services group should also be able to keep your machines malware free so that passwords saved on your business machine browsers would not be sent back to hackers, just like how Coates theorised on how hackers gained information on the Twitter accounts that needed extra security.
