Recent Blog Posts
What are Some Best Practices for Managing Remote Workers? There are plenty of ways that you can do a better job of managing your remote workers, including: Establishing Communication Standards Without maintaining clear and open communications, your remote workers are going to become islands?separated from the rest of your team and isolated. Setting an expectation for how and how often your team members are to communicate and collaborate helps to encourage them to reach out and interact more. Delegate Responsibilities and Hold Them to It Remote workers are just the same as your in-house ones? the only real difference is where they are doing the work. Therefore, it is important that you treat them just the same and hold them to the responsibilities you give them. Now, if these tasks are too much of a challenge in a remote environment, there are many ways to delegate these tasks, from breaking them down into smaller jobs to discussing the process in detail with your team members to incentivizing their work processes. Provide the Necessary Tools for Success Fortunately, many businesses are already using tools that are well-suited for remote work, like cloud-based software and storage and mobile-friendly devices. One particular tool that we strongly recommend?whether or not remote work is in play, to be honest?is a unified communications and collaboration platform. A UCC platform gives you a single tool that provides numerous options for communication amongst your entire team. Acknowledge the Impacts of Overwork and Isolation While many people might assume that those working remotely are kicking back and accomplishing less over the course of the workday, these people would be (for the most part) very wrong. In many, many cases, remote workers are subject to pressure to accomplish more simply because of that assumption. Pairing this kind of overwork with the isolation of working remotely over a long period of time can develop some seriously negative feelings and detrimental impacts to their productivity. Acknowledging this and making efforts to reduce both will help bring you a more successful remote team. Give All the Support You Can As we?ve suggested thus far, your remote team members will need the same things your in-house team members will, including support in numerous forms?not just the IT support required to keep them productive, but also the emotional support that enables them to maintain that productivity over extended periods of time. Listen to them, check in on them, and try to develop support networks for your team members to utilize. Collect Feedback Here?s the long and the short of it?remote work only works if it works for your remote workers. One of your most valuable sources of data is the people you have working remotely. While things might seem hunky dory on the surface and work is being done, your team members may be experiencing some challenges coping with things on their end. Don?t be afraid to ask your team for an account of their experience, possibly using anonymous polling or one-on-one check-ins with your team members. You might be surprised what you learn, or how good some of the ideas that come from your team members are. We Can Help You Embrace the Benefits of Remote Operations In terms of actually enabling remote operations, that?s where we come in. We?ll help you implement and […]
As is the case with most things, you?ll need to take some proactive measures. Activating Your Notification History in Android Android devices offer a functionality called Notification History, buried in their settings, where you can see a list of the notifications you?ve received. Of course, this isn?t activated by default, so you?ll need to go through a simple process: Access your Settings either by swiping down on your home screen to get to the integrated shortcut, or by navigating through your applications to find them. Once there, access your Notification settings, and from there, Advanced settings. You?ll then see Notification history. Tap it to access it. Once you do, you?ll be presented with a deactivated switch. Turn the switch to On, and you?ll have a list of the notifications you recently dismissed! Can I Do This With an Apple Device? Unfortunately, once an Apple notification has been acknowledged?either by being opened, cleared, or deleted outright?it is gone for good. Let us know what else you?d like to know about! If your business works with us as its managed service provider, you?re able to lean on us for assistance with your IT. Find out more about what we can do for you by calling (603) 889-0800.
From Start to Finish, IT Powers the Modern Workday Tell me this: what is the first thing you do each day when the workday starts? Probably get the aforementioned cup of coffee, sure, but once that?s done, you likely log into your workstation. That?s IT. You then probably spend the better part of your day just doing whatever it is you were hired to do, whether it’s producing a product, delivering a service, or meeting with those you work for and with. Most of the time, you?ll be using a tool of some sort to do so. That?s IT. At the end of the day, you likely submit the time you spent doing each of your various tasks as part of your timesheet. That?s IT. IT is everywhere in the modern office space? so, the question is, how well managed is it in yours? With IT Being So Ubiquitous, Managing It and Maintaining It is Critical Considering that IT is present in so many of your business? processes?practically all of them, for some businesses?it is all the more important that you have a handle on it. White Mountain IT Services can assist you in doing so. Give us a call at (603) 889-0800 to learn more.
To begin, let?s analyze what social engineering really is, and why it works so well on us. Social Engineering is Emotional Hacking When all is said and done, that?s really what it boils down to. Instead of trying to find the right combination of 1s and 0s to bypass your cybersecurity, social engineering is the use of the right emotions and thought processes to bypass your human employees. Let?s examine the stained shirt example I provided above. While it probably wasn?t as effective coming in through text, chances are good that you?ve also experienced the old-fashioned version where someone pointed at your shirt and flicked your nose when you looked down?more than likely, many times. Why do we keep looking? We do so for the same reason that social engineering works?hearing that we have something on our shirt has some effect on our emotions. We fear that we?ll look silly, or sloppy, in front of people we respect and (more importantly) we want to respect us. The need to confirm that the stain is there becomes so urgent in the moment that we have to look down immediately, despite being intimately familiar with this kind of trick. In addition to all this, this trick is usually played by someone we trust. This will be important to keep in mind later. Of course, in a business-focused social engineering attack, the stakes won?t often involve a bit of the special sauce from the #5 value meal on your shirt. The professional kind of social engineering plays on different fears and anxieties that are more directly related to the workplace. Since this usually takes some preparation, let?s go through the steps that the person behind the attack will generally take: How an Attacker Prepares Their Social Engineering Attack With some variance in the time spent by an attacker based on how sophisticated they want their attack to be, the first step the attacker will take is to plan their attack, doing their research to figure out their most effective option to fool someone. Let?s step into their shoes for a moment and run through what this research might look like. Let?s say we wanted to attack XYZ Widget Company. As social engineers, our first step is to collect as much data as we can on them. The Internet and its plethora of open-source intelligence (OSINT) make this easier than you might expect. For example, we could turn to the company?s LinkedIn, and discover that Jane Doe and John Q. Public both work there in customer-facing roles. A quick jaunt over to Facebook might reveal that Jane enjoys doing crossword puzzles and fantasy sports, while John is big into DIY activities, ranging from cheesemaking to quilting. From there, it?s an easy matter for us to reach out to either Jane or John using the OSINT we?ve collected and gain some of their trust. Once this trust has been established, we stand a pretty good chance of convincing them to give us more access than is warranted, or share information that they shouldn?t have shared. Of course, we could also take the simple route and instead try our luck with fear tactics. It?s generally a safe bet that an employee doesn?t want to get in trouble in the workplace, so sending a message that claims […]
What Does the Threat Landscape Look Like? First, let?s take a look at the threat landscape as a whole. It?s always changing, so you have to be capable of reacting to shifts in the way threats present themselves or launch their attacks. After all, these hackers are trying to subvert the attempts of the best security researchers on the planet, so you can bet they are bringing their A-game against your business, too. What are some of the challenges you can expect to run into with the cybersecurity environment? Let?s find out. The Most Common Threats The most common threats are made up of phishing attacks, ransomware threats, and distributed denial of service attacks. Phishing Attacks Hackers launch phishing attacks against users to try and gain unauthorized access to their accounts. These phishing attacks can be as simple as an email, a social media post, a telephone call, or other similar tactics, and they often request that the user take action as quickly as possible. While there are plenty of telltale warning signs to look for, it?s often after the fact that people realize what they have done. Many of the other threats we will discuss in this blog are spread primarily through phishing scams. Ransomware Threats Few threats pose as much danger to your organization as ransomware does. It locks down files on your system until you pay a ransom, often in a cryptocurrency like Bitcoin. Ransomware has developed into even more dangerous variants in recent years, now utilizing methods like double-extortion to increase its profitability and success rate. To ensure users pay the ransom, they threaten to release the stolen and locked-down data online, putting their victims in a lose-lose situation. Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) DDoS attacks use the might of millions of infected devices, collectively known as botnets, to bring down networks and websites, overloading them with traffic all at once. Worse yet, these devices aren?t doing anything special?they just use their normal functionality to ping a network over and over until the system crashes. With so much traffic overwhelming the transfer protocols, all productivity grinds to a halt. DDoS attacks can be mistaken for malware or other network issues, and by the time they begin, it?s too late to do anything to stop them. Other options for hackers do exist, of course, but you?ll encounter the above three most frequently, and they will often perpetuate other types of attacks against your infrastructure. How Can You Protect Your Business? To take the fight to cyberthreats, we recommend you use the following strategies: Improve Awareness The greatest challenge you will face is that your employees might not be aware of the dangers posed by cyberthreats. You should do everything in your power to ensure they know that their actions while on the company network could impact the business. We recommend implementing a comprehensive training program that is complete with routine testing and review sessions. Some of the topics you should touch on include multi-factor authentication, how to spot phishing attacks, and how to build a secure password. Training your employees can pay off in spades, so long as it is done well and done often. Update Your Infrastructure All it takes is one weak link in your infrastructure to expose it to untold threats. Be sure to […]