No doubt you’ve seen on the news or your favourite social platform that Microsoft officially withdrew support for Windows 7 on tuesday. It has now reached the end of its life.
This means that we can no longer provide critical support for your Windows 7 machines.
What does that mean?
Seasons Greeting to one and all,
Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.
Remember to have fun if you can and avoid clicking on those phishing links, opening those ‘too good to be true’ emails.
This is 100% true because they are targeting all businesses, all of the time.
Whereas once hacking was something done for the challenge and the bragging rights, these days it’s a form of organised crime.
Hackers use automated tools that are constantly looking for vulnerabilities they can exploit.
This is why it takes just one click on a dodgy email to let someone into your entire network.
To know what you’re up against, download our brand new guide: The 9 cyber threats you need to know about now.
We’re TKNOWIT LIMITED, looking after businesses in Malton, Ryedale and beyond. And we’re on a mission to educate thousands more businesses around here about how to keep themselves safe from hackers.
Cyber crime is the fastest growing crime to affect businesses. When you see what you’re up against, you’ll be better prepared.
Contact Us discuss in more detail.
We are all familiar with having to run software updates on our Windows products regularly to remove vulnerabilities.
Apple’s Mac and iPhone/iPad and TV range are no different but many people have not been made aware or, in some cases, have been told they don’t have vulnerabilities or can’t get hacked. There have always been vulnerabilities but when it comes to hackers it’s often down to the analogy of shooting fish in a barrel. The barrel containing Windows fish is large and well stocked; until recently the Apple barrel wasn’t that well stocked – but now it is – for many reasons which this post is not focused on.
This week some vulnerabilities in the Apple range have started to hit the mainstream press and TV.
If you haven’t seen any of the news then here are a couple of links
BBC https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-49520355
The important thing to take from the publicity is that you should be regularly checking your devices for updates – even if the device is automatically set to apply updates. It can be several days between scheduled checks and your device is vulnerable during that window between the update been made available and your device applying it.
Are poor password practices putting your business at risk?
Our brand new guide tells you the shocking passwords statistics you need to know about, right now.
Read it here
Seasons Greeting to one and all,
Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to all.
Remember to have fun if you can and avoid clicking on those phishing links and opening those ‘too good to be true’ emails.
Our services will be running over the holiday period and, depending upon which one’s you have, monitoring, protecting and maintaining your systems and alerting us to any problems.
Let’s make it a Happy New Year and not a Hacky New Year
Hope to see you all in the New Year
Cheers
Nick
Millennium Bug, GDPR and now the 2020 Problem.
A number of Microsoft titles are going ‘end of life’ in 2020. Previously many people didn’t care about these things until the computer needed replacing and then buying the new version of Office, Windows, etc but, for businesses, GDPR now has to be considered and using unsupported software is frowned upon.
If you’re on an earlier version of window 7 and it’s the 32 bit edition you may need to spend longer making sure any programs you run are 64 bit compatible.
Office and Exchange can be replaced by Office 365 cloud version in most cases without too many problems
We’ve written a guide for you to download please check out our Make Sense of IT section on the website .
Disruption from Friday afternoon and over the weekend has been ‘unprecedented’. In the UK the big impact appears to have been felt by the NHS and this has brought it into the public domain with all of the associated press coverage. Ransomware should now be something that most people are aware of and hopefully they can look at ways to protect their computers.
The attack was not specifically targeted at the NHS and as the weekend rolled on and turned into Monday it became apparent that the attack was worldwide and included a number of US, European and Russian organisations and businesses.
Many commentators are suggesting the person(s) who launched the attack was an amateur but my response would be that this should be of great concern to us all if an amateur can get an attack to spread so rapidly and impact on so many machines. Also some are suggesting that the code of how to launch this attack was stolen from a US security agency (still think its an amateur?) and this agency had known about the security weakness in Microsoft Windows for some time but not reported it to Microsoft.
Microsoft did release a patch in March to resolve this but obviously not everyone had applied this to their systems. Security patches are important to apply as soon as possible but as with all patches they need to be tested before they are rolled out across all machines. Some people will still recall the days when patches often caused the Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) making it more important to test every single patch but this is less of an issue nowadays.
There are several things that can be done to minimise the exposure to attacks and the impact of them should they get through (and also reduce the impact of BSODs).
If you would like to discuss security, patching or backups then give us a on 01653 908069.
Be Safe
Nick Teasdale
Look out for the tKnowIT Renault Kangoo van in your area.
If you ever saw the Toyota Hilux a few years ago you’ll know we like to make the livery eye-catching. This time Gemma and Nick at Big Boolies have done the honours. After a chat about what the message should be they very quickly came up with a mock-up that showed that they had listened, understood and done their research and knew all about the wow factor.