5 terrifying password stats

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

Merry Christmas from tKnowIT

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

the 2020 problem

Do you use Windows 7? Office 2010? Exchange 2010?

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 .

 

tKnowIT Padlock Dog

WannaCry – the public now know what ransomware can do

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.

tKnowIT Padlock DogThere 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).

  1. Have a good Internet Security product. A managed one is preferable because then you can leave the settings, monitoring, etc to experts
  2. If it’s not part of the internet security suite then have a next generation ransomware layer of protection
  3. Automated patching of 3rd party applications such as Adobe Reader, Java, Firefox, Chrome, etc. To update them all manually or when prompted is too time consuming. Some 3rd party applications are essential for day to day tasks but they are the most commonly used point of entry for attacks.
  4. Patch Windows (and other operating systems) regularly. Check at least once a week, even if the device is set to automatically apply updates. Some updates require manually intervention, a bit of a push or several attempts.
  5. Have a backup or three. Make sure your data is backed up off the computer and/ or server. Ransomware can lock locally connected USB flash drives and hard drives making them useless to recover from so both local and cloud (offsite) copies of the data is recommended. If you can create an image of your entire computer then this also helps should your operating system be damaged by a virus, ransomware or one of those bad patches that results in a BSOD.

If you would like to discuss security, patching or backups then give us a on 01653 908069.

 

Be Safe

 

Nick Teasdale

 

 

tKnowIT Kangoo

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.

tKnowIT for IT support, services and solutions

tKnowIT provide IT support, services and systems to businesses, start-ups and home users, large and small, who wish to make the most of their computers and other IT investments.

We offer a range of IT Services and Support including website design and hosting, IT consultancy, computer rollouts and healthchecks, broadband supply and installation, VoIP telephony equipment supply and installation to name a few.

tKnowIT is based in Norton, Malton, North Yorkshire and we can provide onsite business and home support in Norton, Malton and the wider Ryedale area including Pickering, Thorton Dale, Helmsley along with business and home support for the York and Scarborough areas.

tKnowIT offers technical support on a ‘Pay As You Go’ basis, with no binding contracts or fees for support and services you don’t use.

We make sense of your computer problems so you don’t have to

Welcome to the new tKnowIT website

Welcome to the new website design.

At the moment the content is in the process of transferring from the old design and new sections will also be created.

You can still visit the old design by clicking here

A Selection of tKnowIT Services

  • Onsite, phone & remote help (no contracts)
  • Virus removal & protection
  • System healthchecks & upgrades
  • IT consultancy and advice
  • Computer, server & network setup
  • Backup & disaster recovery solutions
  • Help with all of your broadband & wireless problems
  • Internet phones & phone systems
  • Website hosting & design
  • Remote Office / Teleworker solutions
  • Business Spam filtering service
  • Over 20 years experience of I.T.