Business Solutions & Software Group Blog

By now everyone knows about ransomware, the dastardly strand of malware that encrypts data (or the drives it’s stored on) and sends the user a message demanding payment in a certain amount of time before the data is deleted forever. To add a little more menace to an already stressful situation, the message includes a countdown clock. If it sounds like a bad situation, rest assured it is. How could it get worse you ask? Simple, make it more difficult to stop.

There’s one major reason why email is the preferred method of spreading threats like ransomware and other types of malicious software. The sheer number of messages that can be sent through email on its own increases the odds that a user will click on the wrong link or download the wrong attachment. How can you know the legitimacy of any message you receive in your email inbox?

The 2017 Equifax leak was a disastrous scenario, but recent revelations have discovered that even more victims were affected than was previously thought. Nobody ever wants to hear this kind of news, but there is an upside to this that shouldn’t be ignored - learning from the mistake. We’ll start with a refresher on what happened exactly, and what these new developments mean for your organization.

Here’s the thing about IT security: it requires a little more than a decent firewall and a reasonably-strong password. We talk a lot about how to ensure that your business’ network stays a top priority, and the best way to do that is to implement what we call a Unified Threat Management (UTM) solution. An enterprise security system like a UTM can provide a considerable improvement for the way you protect your organization, but even something as simple as a little bit of user error could bypass these protocols.

The Internal Revenue Service has declared to tax professionals that they must take extra steps toward protecting the information of taxpayers. Certified Public Accountant (CPA) firms, whether they are large organizations or small businesses, hold much information that could be used by hackers and identity thieves, which makes them major targets during tax season.