Cybersecurity for Small Business

Do you know your WIFI? By The Network Team of XLN SYSTEMS During the next few weeks as a huge number of us are working at home, we should know if our home networks can handle the capacity and the security we are accustomed to from our business offices.             To start, ask yourself if you are getting the true internet speeds that you are paying for. It is very common for households to find out that they are getting slower speeds than what they are initially paying for. How is this possible?   There are several technical reasons however, simply put, with more people working from home there is going to be more internet traffic. This fact alone is a big factor in how fast your speed will be during certain times of the day.   Finally, if you are getting 80% speed or higher this is considered ‘adequate/normal’. To check your actual speed, go to Speedtest.net      -  ...

Remember the ‘good old days’ of email (like 12-15 years ago) when the most menacing thing we had to worry about was too much advertising spam!   We still have advertising spam by the virtual truckload but today we have yet another thing to add to our email worries: Phishing attempts.   Phishing is a cleverly disguised email, made to look like it came from a trustworthy source, designed to steal your sensitive information, or worse, simply (and naively) convince you to give it away. Phishing emails try to get you to do one of two things: first, to simply hand over sensitive information and second, to download malware which more often than not contains ransomware.   Ransomware is very, very bad.   It will literally take ALL THE DATA on your PC (or server) and encrypt (lock) it so as to make it unusable to you.   In order to get the “key” and de-crypt the data back to normal, you must pay a ransom.   Usually this ransom payment is around $500 and must...

Passphrases and Your User ID!! In our last article we spoke of the “new thinking” of passphrases instead of passwords and we explained how difficult, if not impossible, it is for even a computer to guess your passphrase when it’s larger than 24 or 28 characters. This short article wants to discuss “login credentials”.   Login credentials is defined as both your user-id and passphrase.   (There may be a 3 rd credential, but that’s for another article.) You’ve heard the expression, it takes two to tango.   In other words, a passphrase and user-id must be correct and must be for one another before you are allowed access. So, perhaps your user-id is more important than many had thought previously!    For those sites that allow you to pick your user-id and passphrase, think of each as a security key. Now, what should one use as a user-id?   That’s really up to you, but you can make it easy to remember by using a combination of your nickname, stree...

Are Passwords on their way out? Passwords are a major part of our lives AND we have numerous (some say countless) amounts of them.    They are the keys to our “electronic” locks.   Trouble is, our keys are so easy to copy or guess, we might as well not have the locks!     Why do we need and have so many different passwords?   Because almost every one of the sites requiring a password has a different rule set for creating a password.   Many require an uppercase character or a lowercase character or must have a number or must have a special character AND cannot be a password you have chosen in the past 45 years!        Because we have so many sites where we need passwords, we try to make it easy for us to remember them.   Trouble is, if it’s easy for us to remember, it’s easy for the bad guys to guess.   Did you know that the most common passwords are:   Password, Password123, admin, welcome, letmei...

This short article is the 3rd in a series to help small business owners grow and protect their businesses in the age of cyber threats and digital piracy.  Our 3rd article explains, as an introduction, IoT – The Internet of Things, and is directed not only to small business but to all of us who use the Internet. The Internet is everywhere and the Internet is doing more things for more people than ever before.  One reason for this is the IoT. One formal and technical description of IoT is “The ever-growing network of physical objects that feature an IP address for internet connectivity, and the communication that occurs between these objects and other Internet-enabled devices and systems”. Whew. Did you get that? I like my description better: IoT are all those devices we put on the Internet like household lights, garage door openers, Televisions, home security cameras, our refrigerators and more! Although these things may make ...