Someone is. Or some other weak variant of their pet’s name, child’s name, or their favourite football team.
We’ve seen all of these. And so have the hackers. And that’s why passwords like these are so easy to crack.
People and their passwords are the weakest link in any organisation’s security. That includes businesses in Ryedale and beyond.
Our new video shows you how to easily add a powerful extra layer of security.
Do you already use Microsoft Office 365 in your business?
Lots of people already do. It’s now got 120 million active users across the world. And 50,000 small businesses sign up every month.
Our team are experts at Microsoft Office 365. So, to make things easier we’ve put together 21 great time saving hacks you can enjoy with Microsoft Office 365.
This video tells you more about our brand new guide.
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 .
Oh what a headache. GDPR is finally here. We’ve written a guide to make it easy for you
Most businesses have been putting this off for years.
Putting what off? Implementing the new GDPR data protection laws. It finally comes into play on 25th May.
Like any piece of European legislation, it’s big and complicated and has a lot of pain if you get it wrong.
In May next year, a major data law will come in… and your business needs to get ready now.
It’s called GDPR – General Data Protection Regulation – to replace the data protection act.
And the fines for breaking it are huge… up to €20m. Scary.
The main aim of GDPR is to give individuals a greater level of control over their personal data. This means that all companies who hold any customer information will be subject to strict rules.
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.
For a number of years we haven’t had a real fax machine or fax line to the office and instead we used an Internet Fax-to-Email service. Reviewing the usage over the last couple of years we’ve had 3 faxes, all from an advertising service which doesn’t cover our area anyway.
The internet fax-to-email service has been reliable, we assume, and extremely cost effective and much less than having a fax line rental and fax machine (and consumables) to pay for. If you still need to receive Faxes then we recommend the service.
As most people communicate with us by phone or email (and can scan things) we have removed the fax number from service.
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