January 4th, 2012
This past week many people were treated to a new wireless exploit. This latest vulnerability affects WiFi routers, so your secure WiFi connection, may not be so secure.
A little history; for many years setting up secured WiFi networks required some skill level. While this was fine for companies who provide computer and IT services such as ours, it did come at a cost to the end user. The manufacturers in all their infinite wisdom came up with a simple method for people with little or no skill level, to setup a secure WiFi system.
This past weekend, code was released on the Internet which breaks the security on many WiFi routers in 2 to 10 hours. Some of the wireless routers affected are from the following manufacturers: D-Link, Linksys, Netgear, Buffalo, TP-Link, and ZyXEL.
The code takes advantage of the 8 digit PIN used to verify the connection between computers when using a button to set them up. The manufacturers have yet to respond with a fix.
If you are really serious about keeping your data safe, call or vist www.HITmanSafe.com to request a free Data Disaster Audit and Review. HITman Services can Eliminate the HI-Tech Frustrations in your life. We are a full service IT and technology provider located in Clifton Park, NY.
Tags: clif, Clifton Park computer repair, WiFi Safety, WiFi Security, Wireless network vulnerability
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December 23rd, 2011
It seems as though not a week goes by that there is not some news regarding a major system breach. The government in it’s infinite wisdom, has created new regulations which could put a small business out of business in the event they have a security problem. The interesting part about this, is many of the most severe computer break-ins happen in the government!
Smartphones are increasingly being used in business. People who would not have given a second look to these years ago, have now joined the bandwagon. And now that they have a smartphone, they naturally need to have access to their company information. They regularly send documents and spreadsheets from the office to their mobile devices. While email is far from secure, the main concern when information is received on the smartphone, is its portability is also a very weak link.
Most never realize the implications they and their company will face if their they are the cause of personally identifiable information getting out. How many people set pass codes on their devices? How many encrypt their data?
I was talking with a client a few months ago and she mentioned that she has lost her mobile device in the past. Several years ago I was in a conversation with a person who served on a board with me, and he said a person he knew lost a laptop with medical information on it. He also said there was no protection on the notebook.
If you carry a mobile device it is your obligation to make sure it is secure. If someone got their hands on it, at that point it becomes very easy for them to create a social engineering attack on you and those whose information is on your device. If the identity theft is against you, you’re the one who is going to be spending countless hours on correcting the situation. If the identity theft is against someone else and you are listed as the cause, you could be facing thousands and thousands of dollars in fines.
We are currently offering a free Data Disaster Audit and Review to businesses in the Clifton Park, Albany and Saratoga area. If you’d like some free tips, give us a call or fill out our online form at www.HITmanSafe.com.
Tags: data recovery, Identity theft, iPhone, lost, lost BlackBerry, lost notebook, lost smartphone, lost tablet, stolen BlackBerry, stolen iPhone, stolen laptop, stolen notbook
Posted in Business, Security | Comments Off
December 14th, 2011
More and more doctors and medical facilities are using electronic medical records. The soon (hopefully not) to be implemented health care law will require electronic medical records for everyone. But just how secure will the electronic medical records be?
If you lived in Lawrenceville Georgia, you would seriously be questioning the security of the Gwinnett Medical Center’s IT systems today. The Gwinnett Medical Center which is located near Atlanta, had to shut down the majority of their network yesterday.
The medical center’s network was infected with a virus. This could have been caused by a variety of reasons, such as system which had not been updated or a user doing something that they shouldn’t be doing. Regardless of the reason, this was a major incident, affected a lot of people and in a facility which focuses on saving lives.
One would think that the fault lies with the people running the IT department. While this is a possibility, most people outside of the medical IT field are unaware that many medical devices use standard operating systems such as Windows. While this is not necessarily a bad thing, the makers of these medical devices prohibit keeping the systems updated with the latest patches; this is a horrible practice and one which temps disaster.
Why would any company, especially one which designs and builds medical equipment forbid updating their equipment? Their concern is the devices may no longer work. This is so contrary to common sense it is hard to believe.
Unfortunately caveat emptor, is meaningless here as once the government gets involved and forces organizations to use certain systems, the situation is out of our control!
We are currently offering a free Data Disaster Audit and Review to businesses in the Clifton Park, Albany and Saratoga area who would like some options to help Eliminate HI-Tech Frustrations. If you’d like some free tips, give us a call or fill out our online form at www.HITmanSafe.com.
Tags: Computer virus, electronic medial records, Gwinnett Medical Center, hospital security breach, Virus
Posted in Business, Security | Comments Off
December 8th, 2011
Over the weekend I had a customer service experience which really highlighted the difference between big and small businesses.
For several weeks now I have been dealing with my Time Warner DVR not recording series such as the O’Reilly Factor, while it did successfully record shows such as Cavuto. Everything was set properly and there seemed to be no reason why certain shows were recording properly and others not.
On Saturday, I finally had a few minutes to work on it and placed a call to Time Warner. After 14 + minutes of being on hold I was connected with someone from technical support. After explaining the issue, I was informed that an update caused the issue and was given instructions on how to resolve the problem. The “solution” did not work and at the moment I still need to manually set my recordings.
At 9:48 on Saturday morning, my company received a service request from a person requiring technical support. Their computer was having an issue with the hard drive and requested computer support ASAP.
While our office hours are Monday through Friday from 8:30 am to 5:30 pm, and they were not a client, they received a phone call back within 10 minutes.
Big business may barrage us with messages about how they value our business, but the bottom line is more small businesses really care about providing the best service possible. It is the small business that typically jumps through hoops to help their customers.
We are currently offering a free Data Disaster Audit and Review to businesses in the Clifton Park, Albany and Saratoga area who would like some options to help Eliminate HI-Tech Frustrations. If you’d like some free tips, give us a call or fill out our online form at www.HITmanSafe.com.
Tags: Clifton Park computer repair, Customer service, HITman Services, Time Warner, Time Warner Cable
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December 1st, 2011
Millions of people rely upon cloud services as a method for storing and sharing documents. Another benefit to using the Cloud to store documents is it provides acces to work on the documents from multiple devices, such as Android based smart phones, iPhones, iPads and computers.
When looking for a good solution you need to determine who you will be sharing the documents with. Will you be storing confidential information? If another party got access to the documents, would that be an issue? These are just a few of the questions to ask before committing to a given solution.
Looking at many of the offerings you will find that most all promote the fact that they use SSL encryption for data transfer. While SSL encryption is good, it is not a total solution. What happens once the data gets to the server? Is it encrypted there? Who else can gain access to your files? And are the files truly yours? If the servers are located in a different county, data stored on them falls under the laws of that country.
The cloud can be a great asset or it could become a major liability. Like all things in life, there is good and bad and we must do our best to protect ourselves and the people we work for. Convenience is great but there may be consequences for that ease of use.
We are currently offering a free Data Disaster Audit and Review to businesses in the Clifton Park, Albany and Saratoga area who would like some options to help Eliminate HI-Tech Frustrations. If you’d like some free tips, give us a call or fill out our online form at www.HITmanSafe.com.
Tags: box.net, Clifton Park computer repair, Cloud backup, Cloud computing, cloud computing security, Cloud service, document sharing, document storage, dropbox
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November 23rd, 2011
Over the weekend while taking a break, I happened to see a segment of Fred Clause which was on TV. It was ironic as what was being shown actually happens to lots of businesses, and if it can happen to Santa Clause, it can happen to you.
An “efficiency expert” was sent in by the board of directors to take a look at how Santa runs his operations, and if Santa received 3 checkmarks, would be terminated. Like some employees and contractors, the representative from the board had nefarious intentions.
An opportune moment presented itself and the “expert” started shredding important documents. When the “expert” confronted Santa about the missing documents and asked about his backups; Santa replied nothing like this had ever happened before so they have no backups. This was Santa’s third check mark and he was set for termination.
Being a movie all ended well. But you and I don’t live in a movie set and if something can possibly go wrong it will. Don’t get caught in a trap like Santa. Not everyone has your best interest at heart and it pays to have backups to protect your data and digital assets.
We are currently offering a free Data Disaster Audit and Review to businesses in the Clifton Park, Albany and Saratoga area who would like some options to help Eliminate HI-Tech Frustrations. If you’d like some free tips, give us a call or fill out our online form at www.HITmanSafe.com.
Tags: albany, Albany New York, bad employee, Clifton Park, Clifton Park New York, corrupt employee, data disaster, data protection, document shredding, Santa Clause, Saratoga
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November 16th, 2011
What a topic! Prepare for disaster; and now. How depressing. Or discussing technology disaster now could be for the best. For many however, they will bury their head in the sand, living in a world of ecstasy. After all, everything always happens to someone else. Unfortunately bad things happen and it is much better if we are in a position to deal with the issues when they come up, by being prepared.
Last week a colleague was relating to me an issue he was going through. It seems a data center he works with was facing very serious failures as a majority of their systems were offline. My colleague used this company for all of his data storage and email. Now with the data center not able to service him, he felt like he was working in the blind.
One could argue, how could he know the data center would go down. Most data centers these days rave about a 99.99% + up-time rate, and the data center never had any issue before. Well, in early August if you had asked anybody when was the last time they felt an earthquake in the Albany, NY area, the majority would say never. Had you asked them again at the end of August and their story and frame of reference would be completely different.
Let’s take a look at one scenario which could have helped my colleague. Being a road warrior, his laptop accompanied him everywhere. He also had his iPhone setup for email. His laptop was setup to access his email via a web client. This is typically a good option, but has its drawbacks. In this case because the data center was offline, so was his email. Where this turned into a major issue was that his calendar and contacts were now not accessible. Had he been using a program such as Microsoft Outlook running on his laptop, at least he would have had access to some of the critical data he needed.
My colleague is a very bright individual, he just never took the time to either sit and think of potential issues or talked through possible problems with someone. Regardless of the reason, because the data center was down, he was unable to function anywhere near his potential for several days. The time he lost can never be replaced.
On a positive note, he decided he should take some time and talk with me about planning for future disasters now.
Because we work with many local and regional businesses in the Albany and Saratoga Region, we have been able to put into place backup procedures to help in times like this. If you are unable to access certain portions of your business, how will you continue? Will this be a major or minor incident? We are currently offering a free Data Disaster Audit and Review to businesses in the area who would like some options to help Eliminate HI-Tech Frustrations. If you’d like some free tips, give us a call or fill out our online form at www.HITmanSafe.com.
Tags: Albany New York, Clifton Park, Clifton Park New York, data center, data disaster, Disaster, disaster planning, disaster preparedness, Saratoga
Posted in Business, Technology | Comments Off
November 11th, 2011
Like it or not we live in a world engulfed by technology. And regardless of the technology, at times technology fails. It’s the plans, and procedures we have in place to back us up during those times which separate the companies and people who deal with technology failures in a stressed out state and those who are able to weather the storms and continue.
Earlier this week our entire area was in a so-called Internet blackout state for a period of time for businesses and individuals who use Time Warner’s Road Runner. While we have experienced many of these outages, this one seemed to be on a much larger scale and had the Road Runner crew scrambling.
Our office fielded many phone calls and it was very interesting to hear how people were reacting. We had one woman who was in denial and wanted a service call even though the issue related to the Internet. The majority of people calling in to our Clifton Park IT company were glad to know the issue was not with their systems and we were aware of the situation.
Because we work with many local and regional businesses we have been able to put into place backup procedures to help in times like this. If you are unable to access certain portions of your business, how will you continue? Will this be a major or minor incident? We are currently offering a free Data Disaster Audit and Review to businesses in the area who would like some options to help Eliminate HI-Tech Frustrations. If you’d like some free tips, give us a call or fill out our online form at www.HITmanSafe.com.
Tags: Clifton Park, Clifton Park computer repair, Clifton Park New York, Internet outage, Road Runner, Time Warner
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November 4th, 2011
Early mornings at our Clifton Park IT office, usually is a good time to get a lot of work done as it is quiet. A recent morning I took a phone call from a woman who had some security questions about locking down the family computer to protect her children when using the Internet.
It was a great call because this woman was more knowledgeable than most on methods to help keep her children safe. Her question was about password protecting the BIOS on her computer. This is a very good method to locking down a computer to limit access. I explained the additional steps she would need to take and that the safest place for a family computer was in the kitchen or family room as it can be easily observed by everyone.
Child predators are lurking everywhere on the Internet and children do not understand the realities of what can and often does happen to unsuspecting children. Law enforcement does a good job of helping to keep the predators at bay, but the ultimate responsibility resides with parents. It was wonderful to be able to offer advice to someone in the community who understood the implications of unfettered access to the Internet.
This article was written by The Boss of HITman Services, a computer and IT company, based in Clifton Park and serving the Albany, Troy, Schenectady and Saratoga Counties of New York.
Tags: child predators, Clifton Park, Clifton Park computer repair, HITman Services, Internet pornography, Internet security, Security
Posted in Security | Comments Off
October 26th, 2011
Almost everyone knows about the attorney client privilege and what transpires between a lawyer and client is confidential. But when technology comes into play, all that is said may go beyond the ears of the lawyer and client.
Very recently I had a person visit the office of our IT company in Clifton Park. The salesperson was trying to sell marketing services to me and was from one of the major phone book providers.
During the conversation, this person mentioned that for companies who used their designated phone numbers for tracking, they (the phone book company) has the ability to dial in and listen to calls, and then went on to mention how this person has done just that.
While I kept a poker face, I was outraged by this. While many companies have phone systems which allow the conversation to be taped, I have yet to run across one in an attorney’s office. And the companies always make an announcement that the conversation will may be recorded. But to have an outside person listen in on a conversation which one of the parties (or maybe both) believe the information will be kept confidential, yet is not, is simply unbelievable.
Moral of the story; if you’re making a call to a doctor or lawyer and you want your information to be kept private, you may not want to use the number published in any of the phone books. And if you do, you might want to ask the person if the conversation is being recorded.
If you’re serious about keeping your data safe, visit www.HITmanSafe.com.
This article was written by The Boss of HITman Services, a computer and IT company, based in Clifton Park and serving the Albany, Troy, Schenectady and Saratoga Counties of New York.
Tags: attorney, Clifton Park, Clifton Park computer repair, confidential information, law firm, laywer, Privacy, Security
Posted in Privacy, Security | Comments Off
