Ferrum Technology Services Blog

Weak passwords are a huge problem, one that almost everyone is guilty of. Even if you think of yourself as being a diligent, security-minded person, you probably have at least one or two passwords that are common words, followed by a digit or two, followed by an exclamation point.

I’d be willing to bet that the digits in your password represent either your birthday, your anniversary, or your favorite football player’s jersey. With a little time, anyone could gain access to your account. That’s where two-factor authentication comes in.

The nature of many of today’s businesses is building one product over and over and over. When you have that level of repetitiveness, it helps people find their niche, yes, but it can also result in the attention given to the task to suffer. While a disengaged employee is nothing new, they can cause some operational problems. By and large, a couple of staff hiccups won’t have a huge impact on your business, unless that lack of engagement impacts your cybersecurity. That’s because there are some threats out there that could absolutely cripple your business’ ability to sustain operations. Today, we’ll talk about how to get your staff to care about malware, hackers, and the like. 

Let’s take a look at a real-world scenario that I ran into a few weeks ago with a family friend. For the sake of this story, let’s call him Bob. Bob lost access to a pretty important online account.

Common opinion more or less states that passwords aren’t so much “necessary,” as they are a “necessary evil.” The best practices that are recommended to maintain the efficacy of passwords today can certainly feel excessive - which tempts many users into ignoring these practices, to the detriment of their security. Fortunately, many large companies - like Google - are trying to make passwords easier to manage.

Every business (and every individual, for that matter) needs to be wary of Internet scams and other online tricks. This is because those scammers are wily and have many means of finding a user in a compromising position… or so they claim in a recent scam.

After 143 million people had their personal information put at risk in the Equifax data breach, it comes as no surprise that data security is an even hotter topic than usual. As much as you’d like to think that a breach like that would never happen to your business, this is an unrealistic hope that won’t do you any good if the threat of a data breach does come around. It is much better to be prepared.

Cybersecurity for business contains many complexities that are often difficult to keep track of. If your organization takes a proactive approach to understanding and implementing cybersecurity best practices, you can dramatically increase the security of your organization’s network.

In 2015, there was an incredible amount of information stolen from organizations all over the world. From healthcare companies to government institutions, nobody was safe from the endless onslaught of hacking attacks. Now, in the wake of these hackers’ destruction, it seems that most of the incidents in question exposed passwords and email address; important credentials that put many users’ security in jeopardy.

Humans are always striving to create the next big security measure against the massive wave of online threats. One topic consistently in discussion is biometrics as a security measure, which take advantage of unique biological aspects of users in order to maximize security. Now, the US military is seeing the value of this kind of technology, and they’re funding a campaign to make it available to users.

It’s the holiday season… for everyone but Sony, at least. The tech/entertainment supergiant has been experiencing a ton of security issues lately. Last month, someone hacked into Sony’s databases and stole a lot of information (including unreleased movies, which were later released to the world). This December, it was revealed that Sony stored their passwords in a folder on their server titled “Passwords.”

It doesn’t take much to disrupt your company’s network and cause downtime. Whether it’s from something major like a natural disaster, or something minor like forgetting your network login credentials, you need to have a plan in place that gets your network up and running as soon as possible. Here are three common scenarios that you need to plan for.

The Heartbleed bug, one of the nastiest deficiencies in Internet security to date, was found last week. More than two-thirds of the Internet's secure information could have been leaked from websites utilizing the OpenSSL cryptographic library's encryption style. Most major websites have already issued a patch to resolve the problem, but that doesn't change the fact that this information has been available to anyone looking for it for over two years. Worse still is that you would have no idea how to tell whether your data has been compromised.

The same day that Microsoft ceased supporting Windows XP with security patches was also the day a vicious little monster was discovered – the Heartbleed bug, which renders privacy in the OpenSSL cryptographic library completely obsolete. Basically, anything utilizing the OpenSSL open source library is at risk here. Websites utilizing this form of encryption include Yahoo! Google, and Facebook. To put it in perspective, sites that utilize OpenSSL number more than two-thirds of the entire worldwide web. Though this bug only applies to versions 1.0.1 and 1.0.2 beta of OpenSSL, hackers are able to obtain private keys which can be used to obtain sensitive information from countless people all around the world. Nothing says "heartbreak" like having your identity stolen and your sensitive data Shanghaied.

Security company Trustwave made a discovery last week that sent the online world into a frenzy. They recovered two million stolen passwords from 93,000 different websites. This password cache included user accounts from major companies like Facebook, LinkedIn, Google, Twitter, and Yahoo. Is your password part of this haul?

Your identity has quite a lot of value, especially in the wrong hands. Security firm ZoneAlarm put together some numbers in 2011 concerning identity fraud, and it even shocked us. Let's talk about a few of these statistics and what it means.