Most traditional network security strategies rely on a premise that aged out around the same time as dial-up internet: if someone is physically inside your building—or connected to your VPN—they belong there. It is the digital equivalent of trusting anyone who walks past reception simply because they happen to be holding a coffee cup and wearing a lanyard. In IT, we call this the “castle-and-moat” security model. Once you cross the moat, you have free rein over the kingdom. You can wander into accounting, browse HR files, and borrow the company secrets for the weekend.
Opening an invoice to find an ongoing list of surprise line items is a quick way to ruin a perfectly good cup of morning coffee. Unfortunately, that is standard practice for plenty of service providers who love to slap the phrase “flat-rate” on contracts that are anything but.
Security researchers have found that a sophisticated cyberespionage campaign delivered spyware to Al Jazeera journalists and others… without them ever clicking a link. The exploit, dubbed “AdFection,” operated entirely through digital advertisements that simply had to load on a user’s screen to execute the attack. Let’s examine the situation and what it can tell us about cybersecurity moving forward.
What do you focus on when one of your team members leaves? When employees leave a company, business owners often focus on transitioning the daily workload. Unfortunately, this often overlooks an important fact: departed team members will frequently leave active digital credentials behind that quietly create massive security risks. Let’s talk about it.
It’s that time of year when we all like to embrace the kinds of things that scare us—everything that goes bump in the night, makes our skin crawl, and turns our blood to ice. While most of the time, it is all in good fun, there’s always a hint of truth in the scary stories we tell that holds a crucial lesson. Sometimes, this lesson can even apply to our businesses. Let’s reimagine an old standby as an example of such a story.
Every office has at least one…a workstation wallpapered with sticky notes and reminders, plus an ever-present pile of coffee cups and snack wrappers encroaching on the keyboard. This kind of clutter is legitimately distracting, making it harder for our brains to focus on the task at hand by eating up our limited mental bandwidth with background noise. As a result, maintaining a cleaner, streamlined workspace is a legitimate strategy to boost actual productivity.
Clicking “Restart Later” on a software update notice feels like a quick productivity win when you are in the middle of a workday. Stopping what you are doing to let a machine reboot for ten minutes seems inconvenient when you have work to complete. The problem is that those ten-minute delays stack up fast. What starts as a minor delay usually ends up as an avoidable network outage, a security incident, or hours of wasted payroll.
Even well-managed organizations run into operational blind spots created by modern technology. Falling into simple IT traps puts your data, your employees, and your business continuity at risk. Fortunately, recognizing these subtle errors allows you to resolve them immediately without spending a fortune on new gadgets.
Walk into almost any IT proposal presentation, and you will likely be buried under an avalanche of acronyms. EDR, MDR, SIEM, MFA, BDR, SOC, SaaS, the list goes on until your eyes glaze over and you start wondering if you are reviewing a budget request or a secret military code. For decades, the technology industry has used technobabble as a shield. If an IT provider can make simple concepts sound impossibly complex, they can justify inflated line items while keeping business leaders in the dark. It is an obnoxious habit, and it needs to stop.
If you’ve talked to a software vendor in the past decade or so, you’ve probably heard a pretty consistent pitch for the cloud: your access will be seamless, you’ll have nothing to maintain, there’s no limit to what you can do! Unfortunately, this isn’t necessarily the case. If either your business or the cloud provider experiences an outage, for instance, all these benefits evaporate. Your business is, for all intents and purposes, closed until the problem is solved. Enter the local database, a practical and efficient way to overcome this weakness.