Tip of the Week: Ergonomics Tips For the At-Home Worker
Not everyone has a living situation that is conducive to working from home. That’s why many people have some problems as they are forced to work remotely during the COVID-19 pandemic. One of the problems with not having a dedicated space or the right type of situation to get work done from home is that your physical health starts to suffer. Today, we thought we would go through a couple of ergonomic suggestions that can help any remote worker feel better when working long hours from home.
Your Seat
You will want to find a comfortable seat, but you’ll probably want to avoid your bed or a couch as the primary seating arrangement when working from home. A hard chair doesn’t give enough support to the lower back or legs. If you can, get a chair with some type of built-in lumbar support, but if you can’t do that you can easily use a pillow or rolled-up throw blanket for this purpose. Ideally, it should have arms so you can rest comfortably, but if it doesn’t you can still use the tabletop/desk to rest your arms without crouching over.
Additionally, if you don’t have a station that allows your feet to plant firmly on the floor, you will want to acquire a footrest. You can use reams of paper or a step stool. The aim is to have a workstation that allows your knees and hips to be at a right angle and have your feet planted firmly on a solid surface.
Table/Desk
You will want a proper tabletop to do work on. If you don’t have a desk, a countertop or table will work as long as you can comfortably sit/stand without much strain. Most people work from seven-to-nine hours a day, ensuring that you have the space you need to do your work without having to contort is important.
Accessories
If you use a laptop there are solutions out there that can allow you to broadcast your screen onto your TV or another monitor. This can work to give you more workspace or simply a larger display to complete work on.
Another popular accessory is noise-canceling headphones. At home, there are often more things that can distract you than there are in the office. Get a good set of noise-canceling headphones—preferably ones with a built-in microphone—and you’ll be able to tune out of “home” and into “work”.
All the other peripherals should fit into a system that keeps your body well-positioned while you are working. That includes the chair, desk, computer, mouse, keyboard, and any other work-required equipment.
If you would like to talk to one of our IT consultants about getting your staff the technology and resources they need to be their best in these difficult times, give us a call at 651-234-0895.
Managed Services Isn’t Just IT Support
Managed IT services are well known for being an incredibly useful service for a business as it helps offset the cost of keeping their technology up and running. What they aren’t as well known for are all the other services that they do to add value for their customers.
Your Business Technology
The first thing that people new to managed services should understand is that, yes, IT support is our number one function and most of our services are bundled because it is the best way for our clients to experience close-to-optimal operational continuity at a price point that works for them.
That doesn’t mean that we are fixing computers all day.
In fact, in the scope of things, fixing computers is just one of the myriad of things we need to accomplish every day to ensure that our clients’ IT infrastructures are working as intended. Today, we thought we would take a look at some of the services we provide, and how collectively, the service can absolutely pay for itself.
Remote Monitoring and Management
The first thing you’ll need to know is that we find that when our technicians are at your business, that productivity slows. Having IT technicians poking around onsite can be distracting. Besides, we aren’t trying to react to IT problems, we are trying to keep them from happening in the first place. How is that possible? With secure, remote technology.
We’ve invested in enterprise-grade, cutting-edge technology to constantly monitor your entire IT infrastructure and network to ensure that if any piece of equipment is not working as intended that it is fixed before it becomes a problem. This proactive nature to IT is the most valuable part of our offering. We fix issues with your IT before they can be profit-destroying problems. Think about how much downtime hurts your bottom line.
If you could curtail your exposure to situations where IT problems cause your downtime and do it at a fraction of the cost of hiring a team of IT experts, you’d consider that value, right? Most decision makers would, which is why MSPs today need to deliver more. Let’s take a look at some of the other services we provide that are meant to add to our value.
Regular Reviews
One of the issues with technology is that as soon as you get a piece of technology there is something better (or worse, more suited to your needs) coming right behind it. This means that if you are going to look outside your door for IT support and services, you need them to keep you in the loop.
At Point North Networks, Inc., we adhere to regular reviews because we want your business to be the best it can be. Around every quarter we will schedule a call or meeting to go over what your goals and priorities are for the upcoming months. Not only does that give us the ability to help you plan your technology investments, it allows us to follow up on any issues we may have had in the weeks leading up to the meeting.
Vendor Management
Vendor management is a relatively simple service, but it can make a big difference. Think about how much time you spend dealing with your technology vendors in a given month. They follow up all the time and try to upsell you. Sometimes those investments make sense, but often they are just trying to make sales.
Our vendor management service basically removes this responsibility from you and your staff. We will be the point of contact for all of your technology vendors. This not only puts a technology professional in place as a point of contact, it also allows you to separate yourself from those relationships that take away time and attention from your ultimate goals for your business.
Patch Management
Software is a major part of every business’ operational strategy, and if it isn’t updated regularly, it can actually expose your business to risk. Unpatched software often leaves your network vulnerable to outside attack. Today’s hackers only need one opportunity to get into your network and steal your data or infect your business’ IT with malware. With patch management, you never have to worry about that again.
Backup and Disaster Recovery
Another massive value we provide comes in the form of a backup and disaster recovery solution. We offer full and partial backup programs that meet industry best practices. You will get a network-attached BDR that you can use to quickly restore from if need be, but you also get incremental backups stored in the cloud should something more severe happen. With your data protected from loss, you can have the peace of mind that if something happens, your business’ continuity will be strong.
Fix Computers
While we try to maintain every piece of your IT infrastructure, sometimes machines fail. It goes without saying that should the need arise, our professional technicians will fix your hardware onsite.
If you would like to learn more about our professional managed IT services, or you would just like to have a conversation about your business’ technology goals, give us a call right now at 651-234-0895.
Remote Work is Not Without Its Issues… How Can They Be Addressed?
The COVID-19 pandemic brought with it no small amount of uncertainty, including amongst business owners who were looking at a very up-in-the-air future. With so many lacking the technology needed to support remote operations—never mind the fact that remote work was a new concept for so many—the learning curve was a considerable hurdle. However, with vaccines being administered and restrictions lifted, it now becomes critical to find a balance.
How Work Needs to Shift
Despite many business owners resisting remote work on principle, it quickly became the only viable option for some organizations to remain open. Most of these businesses and their owners will want to return to the way things were before—but this may not be practical for some time, if ever. A study has revealed that more than 70 percent of employees who needed to suddenly shift to remote operations are hoping to see some of this flexibility carry over—even though half of these employees are also waiting to return to the office with anticipation.
While this may seem strangely counterintuitive, that much is to be expected.
The ongoing global health crisis turned most of the world on its head, including many impressions about remote work. While the escape of sorts from the office may have initially been a welcome change, the reality of the home environment and its additional responsibilities soon set in. While these employees don’t necessarily want to rush back into the office completely, remote work hasn’t agreed with them as well as may have been expected.
This experience has not been consistent for everyone, either.
Many business leaders are having a far easier time than their subordinates are, simply because of the disconnect that often occurs in remote work setups. In an office, it is much easier to pick up on the trend when someone is having a hard time. When a team is working remotely, these kinds of issues become more difficult to detect.
So, to compare…
Decision makers are earning more, enjoying their time more, and are more flexible in their work as they operate remotely, while the people they’ve hired are often overworked, unappreciated, and simultaneously abandoned while being told that a “familial work atmosphere” is important.
Poorly Managed Remote Operations Also Breed Stagnation
Your employees aren’t the only ones who will have a tough time with poorly-planned remote operations—your entire business could potentially see some drawbacks. Operating out of a centralized, shared location just makes it more convenient for team members to collaborate, which increases the quality of their communications and decision making.
Meanwhile, a year’s worth of remote conferencing has many people sick of it, just doing as much work as they need to so it can be considered “done.” In other words, without the face-to-face interaction of the office, many employees might become complacent.
In turn, the business could become complacent as well.
Making the Hybrid Office Work
Let’s look to the (hopefully) near future, when the restrictions that many businesses are subject to can be relaxed somewhat. Naturally, businesses are going to want their team members to come back at optimum productivity, operating from the place of business once again. Some people look forward to this, others, not quite so much.
As a result, many businesses will likely adopt a more hybrid approach to work, allowing greater access to remote work. Sounds pretty good, but it isn’t that simple.
There are a lot of questions that you’ll have to answer to do this. For instance, how many days will each team member be required to come into the office? One study polled executives to reveal that 68 percent of them would like to see their teams in-house at least three days out of each workweek. Workers conversely placed the maximum requirement at three days per week, with each employee’s responsibilities factoring into their requirement.
Globally, there is also a vast difference in how urgent in-office operations seem to different countries. In the U.S., 22 percent of executives see a return to the office as a priority. Similar companies in Canada, Germany, Japan, and China disagree, with fewer than five percent agreeing.
Unfortunately, the only thing that’s certain about this kind of hybrid work model is how uncertain we are about any of it. How will it impact the many metrics that a business is concerned about—from its culture to its productivity to its employee retention? What is the best option?
Frankly, there isn’t any single correct answer, simply because each business has its own unique situation.
Point North Networks, Inc., is here to help you balance out your business’ situation with IT tools and solutions so that your team members can perform the way you need them to. Give us a call at 651-234-0895 to find out what we can do for you.
Using YouTube to Improve Everything
Training your staff to be better at their jobs is not only a business owner’s responsibility, but it’s also expensive and time-consuming. When someone suggests that you use YouTube for your business’ training purposes, the first thought is: “Are you crazy? We don’t have the money for that!” That is a reasonable response if the suggestion was that you start making YouTube videos for your business’ training purposes, sure, but if you use YouTube resources that are already there, you can quickly improve your business with nary a penny spent. Today, we will discuss the options that can make using YouTube a strong resource for your business.
About YouTube
We’re not going to go into what YouTube is, since if you don’t know by now, us telling you isn’t going to help. What we will say is that YouTube is more than just video game and anime reviews. It can be a great resource for personal and professional growth, and if it is utilized by a business to explore concepts that provide value for their staff, it can be a real benefit.
It can also be a giant time-sink.
Anyone that has been on YouTube knows that there are literally millions of hours of videos about any topic important to any human being. It’s a lot of content. In fact, according to Google, the parent company of YouTube, nearly five billion videos are watched on YouTube every day. Many businesses have blocked YouTube using content filtering because their staff will spend too much time watching and sharing videos. 720,000 hours of new video content is updated every day, after all. It’s just a massive platform…
…and you can use it pretty easily to improve your business, if you know how.
How Can I Use YouTube to Improve My Business?
We’re not going to get into the marketing and content creation avenues, but both can work well for any business looking to expand their reach and/or authority. In fact, you can use the strategy we’re about to tell you to put together a stream of useful information to help your marketing department understand how to make those strategies work for your business.
The strategy we want to tell you about is using existing YouTube content to help train your staff and expand their knowledge base about your business, your market, the services you provide your customers, customer relationships, cybersecurity, and much, much more. You can do this pretty simply by creating a playlist.
Anyone who has been around for a couple of decades started making playlists by sitting by the boombox and recording songs they like on a cassette tape, but most of today’s younger people have been making playlists in iTunes and Spotify for years. The same principle applies when creating a playlist for your business’ training. You find content that is useful, entertaining or both, you add it to a playlist and you share the playlist with people you want to take in the content. It seems like it is a little too simple to help your business, but you would be shocked at the results some small and medium-sized businesses have had using YouTube content to expand their staff’s knowledge base on a lot of subjects.
How Do I Make a Playlist?
The process of making a playlist is longer than you may think, only because you have to view all the content you want to add to the playlist. Otherwise, it’s extremely easy. Here’s what you do:
- You find a YouTube video you want to add.
- Directly under the video, you will click the Add to button.
- There will be a dropdown menu. Choose Create new playlist.
- Enter a name for the playlist.
- Choose any privacy settings you want to enact for the playlist. For businesses, we suggest unlisted.
- Click create.
That’s it. Then you can add to the playlist by clicking on the Add to button under a video and placing it on the corresponding playlist. You will quickly find that the hardest part about sharing content with your team is watching it to ensure it is right for the purposes of your design.
There is a lot of great and useful content on YouTube that any small business can use to improve the way their staff understands the concepts they need to master to help a business grow. If you would like to talk about how you can use technology to improve the way you do business, give Point North Network, Inc., a call today at 651-234-0895.
Your Guide to the Modern Varieties of Cybercriminal
There is an entire litany of stereotypes that are commonly linked to the term “hacker”… too many for us to dig into here, especially since they do little but form a caricature of just one form that today’s cybercriminal can take. Let’s go into the different varieties that are covered nowadays under the blanket term of “hacker,” and the threat that each pose to businesses today.
To give this list some semblance of sensible order, let’s go from the small fish up to the large players, ascending the ladder in terms of threats.
The Ethical Hacker
First and foremost, not all hackers are bad. Certified Ethical Hackers are high-profile cybersecurity experts that are designed to think like a cybercriminal. They can be employed to determine how secure your organization is.
The Unintentional Hacker
We all make mistakes, and we can all get a little bit curious every now and then. Therefore, it stands to reason that this curiosity could get people into trouble if they were to find something—some mistake in its code or security—on a website. This is by no means uncommon, and the question of whether this kind of hacking should be prosecuted if the perpetrator reports their findings to the company has been raised by many security professionals.
Regardless, if someone can hack into a website without realizing what they are doing, what does that say about the security that is supposed to be protecting the website… or, by extension, a business’ network? Whether or not you take legal action, such events should never be glossed over and instead be addressed as growth opportunities for improving your security.
The Thrill Seeker
Each of the hackers we’ll cover here has their own motivation for hacking into a network. In this case, that motivation ties directly back to bragging rights (even if the hacker only ever brags about it to themselves). While these hackers were once far more common, the heightened accountability and legal consequences that such behaviors now bring have largely quashed the interest in such hacking. Many of those that would have once been interested in this kind of hacking are now focused on modifying hardware over software, turning to interest-based kits like the Raspberry Pi and others to scratch their “hacking” itch.
The Spammer
Adware—or a piece of software that hijacks your browser to redirect you to a website hoping to sell you something—is a real annoyance, as it wastes the user’s valuable time and energy. It also isn’t unheard of for otherwise well-known and legitimate companies to use it in their own marketing, despite the risk they run of having to pay regulatory fines due to these behaviors.
While the real damage that adware spamming can do may seem minimal, it is also important to put the nature of these efforts into perspective. An adware spammer will use the same tactics that other serious threats—things like ransomware and the like—are often spread through. If you’re finding your workstations suddenly inundated with adware, you are likely vulnerable to a much wider variety of threats than you might first assume.
The Botnet Recruiter
Some threats to your network aren’t even technically directed toward your business itself. Let me ask you this: would you see it as a threat to have your computing resources taken over and co-opted for another purpose? After all, the result is effectively the same as many more directly malicious attacks—greatly diminished productivity and efficiency.
This approach is quite literally how a botnet operates. Using specialized malware, huge numbers of otherwise unassociated machines can be taken under control and have their available resources directed toward some other means. A particularly famous example of a botnet’s power came just a few years ago, when a botnet was utilized to disrupt the services of Dyn, a DNS provider. This took popular websites like Twitter and Facebook down for several hours.
Missing or neglected patches are one of the simplest ways for a botnet to claim your resources as its own—particularly when login credentials haven’t been changed.
Hacktivists
While political activism can be a noble cause, the hacktivist goes about supporting their cause in a distinctly ignoble way. Operating in sabotage, blackmail, and otherwise underhanded tactics, a hacktivist that targets your company could do some serious damage—despite the good that most of these groups are truly attempting to do.
Of course, the law also doesn’t differentiate between different cybercrimes based on motive, making this form of protest particularly risk-laden for all involved.
The Miners
The recent cryptocurrency boom has seen a precipitous uprising in attacks that try to capitalize on the opportunity, using tactics that we have seen used for good and bad for many years now. Above, we discussed the concept of a botnet—where your computing resources were stolen to accomplish someone else’s goal. However, the practice of utilizing borrowed network resources is nothing new. The NASA-affiliated SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute once distributed a screen saver that borrowed from the CPU of the computers it was installed on to help with their calculations.
Nowadays, cybercriminals will do a similar thing, for the express purpose of exploiting the systems they infect to assist them in hashing more cryptocurrency for themselves. The intensive hardware and utility costs associated with mining cryptocurrency often prohibit people from undertaking it on their own—so enterprising hackers will use their malware to find an alternative means of generating ill-gotten funds.
The Gamers
Despite the dismissive view that many have towards video games and their legitimacy, it is important to remember that the industry is worth billions (yes, with a “B”) of dollars, massive investments into hardware and hours poured into playing these games. With stakes that high, it is little wonder that there are some hackers that specifically target this industry. These hackers will steal in-game currency from their fellow players or launch their own distributed denial of service attacks to stifle the competition.
The Pros-for-Hire
The online gig economy has become well-established in recent years—where a quick online search can get you a professional to help you take care of your needs, whether that be for childcare or for car repairs or any other letter of the alphabet. Similar services exist for directed cybercrime efforts as well.
Using a combination of home-developed malware as well as examples that they’ve bought or stolen themselves, these professionals will license out their services for a fee. Whether it’s a governmental body seeking sensitive intel or a business seeking to undermine a competitor, these mercenaries can pose a significant threat against anyone who lands in their crosshairs.
The Thief
On a related note, a lot of modern cybercrime is simply a digitized version of crimes we have seen in years past. Without another stagecoach to hold up, highway robbery has simply been shifted to the information superhighway, the stick-‘em-up translated to ransomware, dating scams, or denial-of-service attacks. The overarching motivation behind most of these efforts is simple: illegitimate fiscal gain.
The Corporate Crook
Corporate spying is a decidedly more direct version of the pro-for-hire trend that we discussed above, where a hacker will target a business’ documents and resources to help their competition in any way they can. While there may not be honor among thieves, there can be amongst the businesses that these thieves will try to sell stolen data to, as some companies have reported the theft after being approached.
The Nation State
Finally, we come to perhaps the biggest threat out there to many: massive teams of professional, government-employed hackers working to undermine the operations and machinations of other nations—both in their governments and their industries. This is generally intended to put the other nation in a diminished position should hostilities ever erupt.
If you remember the 2014 satirical movie The Interview—and more pertinently, the hack that Sony Pictures suffered in retaliation for the film—you’re aware of a very recognizable example of this kind of threat actor.
Clearly, the idea of a hacker that so many have is far too minimalistic to be relied upon anymore… especially if you’re staking your company’s cybersecurity preparedness on it. That’s why Point North Networks, Inc., is here to help. Our professionals are well-versed enough in best practices to help prepare you to deal with a much more realistic cyberattack. You just have to reach out to us at 651-234-0895 to get started.
Counting the Reasons for the 3-2-1 Data Backup Rule
I hope I don’t have to tell you how important your business’ data is to its continued survival, just as I hope I don’t need to explain why this makes this data a priority to protect, regardless of your business’ size. What I do want to explain is the concept of the 3-2-1 Rule and how it pertains to your data backup, and why we would recommend that one for your business’ purposes.
What Makes a Data Backup Such an Important Asset?
In a word: insurance.
Data is, as we’ve well established, a crucial component to your business’ continued operations and survival. Tons of it is generated, collected, stored, and updated each day to support our daily lives. If a business were to lose the data that it had accumulated, it would suddenly find itself in a very bad spot.
This is what makes the idea of a data backup such a good one—in many cases, it is this backup that keeps a business from going under. Of course, this requires that the data backup be properly maintained as well.
To put themselves in the position that offers the most success, we generally recommend that businesses prepare their data backups in accordance with the 3-2-1 Rule.
What is the 3-2-1 Rule of Data Backup?
Simple: keep at least three copies of your data, in two mediums or formats, at least one copy of which kept off site and separate from the others.
Why multiple copies? Multiple copies ensure that—should one of your backups become corrupted or infected or otherwise infiltrated, you have a spare or two to fall back on. While we say three, three should really be considered the bare minimum.
Why multiple formats or mediums? Well, consider what would happen if you made yourself two lunches in case it rained, but packed both into a paper bag. With both in a paper bag, the backup lunch would end up equally soggy as the original lunch. Keeping your backup in a different format or storage medium helps prevent it from being impacted by the same thing that damages the original.
Why the offsite version? Keeping a backup offsite helps to ensure that—even if a disaster were to completely annihilate your business’ physical location—the data you rely on would still be accessible to you by virtue of the data backup. This gives us something else that is important to consider: the concept of an “air gap” in terms of data security.
What is an “Air Gap?”
Let’s go back to our “backup lunch” example, for a moment. While having an extra lunch was a good idea—our example made it clear why—keeping it so close to the original removed its benefits. However, if we were to take the same concept of having a backup lunch and add in an air gap (keeping an extra lunch in the break room at work, or stashing a few bucks to order something out, perhaps), we removed the threat of a single disaster preventing us from eating.
In terms of the data on your network, an air gap is just that—physical distance and separation helping to isolate resources and protect them from many threats.
Point North Networks, Inc., is here to help businesses like yours manage all the complexities of their technology so that you have more room to succeed. Give us a call at 651-234-0895 today to find out more.
Tip of the Week: How to Take a Screenshot in Windows 10
Okay, so first off: when it comes to taking a screenshot, today’s user has a lot of options baked into Windows. Of course, there’s the Print Screen key on most keyboards—but that only allows the user to literally take a screenshot of their entire display and edit it down in some other program.
This simply isn’t a convenient enough option for today’s productivity-focused workflows. Instead, let’s go over how to use Windows’ integrated Snip & Sketch tool, which gives you greater functionality at comparable ease.
Using Snip & Sketch
Snip & Sketch is a utility that offers four options for you to use in terms of your screenshots and can be easily called up by pressing Windows Key+Shift+S. There, you’ll have access to four different screenshot format options at the top of your screen:
- A basic box selection, where you click and drag to encompass your selection
- A freeform selection that allows you to draw out your boundary
- Window snip, which allows you to select an active monitor to screenshot
- Fullscreen snip, which takes the place of the Print Screen key and allows you to take a picture of all your monitors simultaneously
Any of these can be useful in the right situation, and these situations are only too common in the workplace.
Hopefully, this will help you communicate more clearly in the office, using images to help get the message across. For more handy tips and other useful IT information, make sure you check back here every so often—and don’t forget to give our team a call at 651-234-0895 for more direct assistance from us!
How’s Your Password Hygiene?
I’m not sure we need to tell you how important passwords are: they are the front-line defense to most of the accounts you create. What is often overlooked is the strategy of how to use a password to successfully protect accounts and data. Today, we will discuss best practices when creating and managing your passwords and how you are likely approaching your password strategy improperly.
Creating Strong Passwords
It’s true that passwords can be a pain to manage. Anyone who has been locked out of an account because they can’t remember their password knows this all too well. That’s why it is important to create passwords that are both easy to remember and that are secure enough to protect you. Cybercriminals have tools at their disposal that do a pretty good job of being able to crack passwords, so you need to keep that in mind when you are choosing yours.
As you set out to create your passwords, you should keep the following two points of emphasis in mind.
- A hacker may try to brute force attack any password that cannot be guessed or cracked, rapidly trying each combination possible.
- A password’s security and its resistance to brute force attacks are two different things.
Brute force attacks can really be devastating, but when you create your passwords, you have to keep in mind that any hacker with the will to brute force your computing network and left with the time to complete their hack, will likely find a way into your network. What you are doing when you are selecting a strong, memorable password is trying to make certain that the only way they are cracking your password is through brute force.
Typically we like to encourage that your passwords meet the following metrics:
- Are longer, typically over 16 characters
- Use a combination of numerals, letters (with upper and lower case characters), and symbols
- Don’t use privileged or personal information, or any information that can be tied to you through online searches
- No common words or numbers
- No consecutive letters or numbers
So How Do You Optimize Your Password’s Effectiveness?
With those practices, you will be pretty far along, but you also have to understand that the hackers’ tools are extremely powerful. That’s why on top of those suggestions, you will also want to add some complexity to your passwords. Studies have shown that about 41 percent of all passwords are composed exclusively of lowercase letters. If we have access to this information, it stands to reason that someone who makes a living breaking into networks and stealing data knows it as well. Therefore, along with adding symbols, varying cases, and numerals, one strategy is to use a passphrase of random words.
The reason for this is that, with a password that looks like this “7i&3RkIn&4L1f3” the chances that you remember it if you use the account sparingly is pretty low. Besides, it is not that secure, as it is effectively a complex sentence. Remember, the hacker has to get your password completely correct to effectively gain access, so instead of trying to come up with intricate ways of typing statements that can be easily guessed, try taking three words that don’t have any natural connection, incorporating numbers and some varying capitalization, and padding either side with symbols.
A process like this makes the password more usable. It very likely won’t be guessed, is long enough to protect your account, is effective against the brute force attack, and will be easier for you to remember.
Speaking of which, since you shouldn’t use the same password for multiple accounts, you will end up with dozens of passwords. Keeping them straight, especially over the long haul (as you will likely have to reset passwords from time to time), is difficult. That’s why we recommend using a password manager. Many people take advantage of the password saving feature inside their browser. This is effective, but we recommend using a third-party manager that features encryption. This tool will be the most secure and reliable; and, you won’t have to worry about remembering every password.
At Point North Networks, Inc., we consider cybersecurity one of the most important parts of a business’ IT strategy. Give us a call a 651-234-0895 to see how we can help you keep your IT assets safe
Dangerous Android App Masquerading as System Update
Let’s face it, most people are glued to their phones when they have downtime. Many don’t look up to cross the street. With this much dedication to their individual mobile devices you’d think that people would be more careful about what they download.
Apparently, that Instagram feed is just too distracting to worry about individual data security.
Researchers from the mobile security firm Zimperium have discovered a malicious app that pretends to update your Android device, but is just spyware that can steal almost all of your data and monitor your search history and your location. Simply called “System Update” it has tricked many unsuspecting Android users as of this writing.
What Can “System Update” Do?
The spyware, or officially Remote Access Trojan (RAT), attached to this malicious download can only be downloaded outside of the Google Play store, which is fortuitous for many would-be victims of a malware attack like this. The spyware can effectively steal messages, contacts, device information, browser bookmarks, user search history, and can gain access to the microphone and the camera.
What’s more, it continuously tracks a user’s location, which can be really dangerous for anyone. The app starts spying every time the device receives new information, which for any heavy user is constant. After stealing your data, the app will work to erase the evidence of it’s activity, effectively covering its tracks indefinitely.
All-in-all, it is a pretty tough cookie.
How Are People Accessing This Malware?
You won’t be surprised to learn that phishing is the number one way people are being exposed to the corrupt “System Update” app. Google continuously warns people to not install apps from outside the Google Play app store, but as people’s devices age, they aren’t always compatible with older operating systems found on these devices and start looking for options outside of the Google Play app store. This can lead to people downloading apps that seem useful, but are completely nefarious. “System Update” seems to be one of those apps.
What You Can Do to Protect Yourself
While there have been nefarious apps found on the Google Play store in the past, the malicious app rate is extraordinarily low when sticking to the official app store. Users should also consider questioning any situation where an app is suggested for you outside of the app store, even if it seems to redirect you to the Google Play apps store. You just never know what you are going to get when you trust third parties on the Internet.
If you need a comprehensive plan to protect your business data from employee impulse and mobile negligence, give our technicians a call today at 651-234-0895. We can help you with mobile device management (MDM) and Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) which can have all types of benefits for your business.
Tip of the Week: How to Keep Your Team from Burning Out
Considering what the past year has been like, the idea that workplace burnout has been a hot topic isn’t all that surprising—even though less time has been spent in many offices than almost any other time to date. Regardless, burnout simply isn’t an office issue, meaning that remote workers are still susceptible to its ill effects.
This isn’t something that you want to encourage, so let’s go over what constitutes burnout and how to identify and address it for the benefit and betterment of your team.
What is Burnout?
Let’s face facts—most people that read this blog will have likely felt burnout for themselves at some time or another. Having said that, many likely underestimate the full experience that burnout can bring.
Most probably understand the all-encompassing tiredness that burnout is commonly associated with, both mentally and physically, but this state can also have additional impacts. Burnout also tends to make people feel apathetic and cynical, and it can lead to impaired motivation, lessened self-confidence, and other negative attributes.
When these outcomes come together, it can encourage the development of toxic workplace conditions that—if not avoided entirely—need to be addressed and resolved. To do that, you need to be able to spot burnout as it happens.
Spotting Burnout Amongst Your Team
If you hope to have any chance of catching burnout, you need to have a good awareness of your team members’ (and your own) mental state. Dedicating a few moments to brief self-evaluation to help identify the triggers that dictate how you are engaged (and likewise disengaged) in your work can make a huge difference over time.
With so many people currently feeling a loss of control over many aspects of their life, such stresses need to be kept under control in the office environment. One way to accomplish this is to establish some consistent and predictable routines to be followed in the office, emphasizing control, and decreasing the potency of employee burnout.
Resolving Burnout
Finally, one of the biggest key points to preventing the ill effects of burnout is the importance of taking a step away from it all—particularly when you don’t seem to have any time to waste.
While the human brain is a shockingly complex and capable construct, it does have its limits. Like anything else, it just isn’t built to support 100 percent efficiency, and forcing it will work out about as well as it sounds like it would. Giving yourself some respite in the form of some time off—even a few moments of it during the workday—can help prevent burnout from taking hold.
On an organizational level, incentivized collaboration and other support incorporated into the workday can help prevent burnout even further.
Point North Networks, Inc., can help you where this comes into play. By giving your team the tools necessary to cultivate a cohesive and collaborative environment, we can help reduce the factors that contribute to burnout in general. Find out more by giving us a call at 651-234-0895 today.
