Farewell Microsoft TMG! But What Do You Replace It With?

Microsoft have announced that they are no longer going to be supporting Microsoft Threat Management Gateway (TMG) from April 2015. So what should you do if you have been using Microsoft TMG as a firewall, proxy server or web filter?

In reality, TMG’s technology was starting to look a little “old hat” anyway. Filter lists can only ever know about a small percentage of the web sites on the internet, and it can be a hacked business site that can hurt you! 

 
Web security today needs be a little smarter to protect your networks:

Blocking Known Hacked Web Sites

If you end up with a Trojan or spyware on your PC, you have a 90+% chance that you got it from a malicious or hacked web site. These days, web security solutions refers to a constantly updated database of known hacked or malicious web sites to which access is blocked.

Control of Web Applications

Love them or hate them, web applications such as YouTube and Skype are here to stay. There is some great training / research material on YouTube, and Skype can be incredibly useful, but it gobbles up your internet connection if you aren’t careful. Today’s web protection products allow you to control the amount of your internet bandwidth that can be used by video and audio, so that you have at least some bandwidth reserved for home workers and email.

Facebook security

Facebook is probably an integral part of your marketing strategy, but it is also a great way to waste time playing games and a playground for malicious code that can infect your PC’s. You need a system that can allow you to update your company’s Facebook page but block downloads of malicious code and stop your users playing games. 

Different manufacturers approach web security in different ways. You can secure internet access on your employees’ PC’s, using a web proxy appliance, integrated into your firewall, or as a hosted web security service. 

If you are a UK company and need some help in deciding which approach is right for you, please do get in contact so that we can find out a little more about your IT installation and recommend some sensible options.

How Would A Server Crash Effect Your Business?

Could your company carry on doing business if your server failed and you were unable to recover your data? If your answer is that “It’s not going to happen!” because you know that you have got that one covered, then great. If on the other hand you have just felt a chill run down your spine at the very thought of your server failing, then don’t put it off any longer. If your data is that important to you, then for heaven’s sake do something about it. 

Uninterruptible Power Supplies

If your server sits in your office, you should protect it using an Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS). A UPS does 2 jobs. Its primary job is to provide you with time to shut your machines down properly in the event of loss of power. It does this by providing you with power from its batteries. Servers don’t like losing power unexpectedly. It can cause corruption on the hard drive and in extreme cases can make it impossible to read data from it. The second job that a UPS will do for you is to smooth out the power and protect you against temporary power surges which could damage your server as well as momentary loss of power which could cause the system to shut down unnecessarily.

When looking at a UPS, there are two things that you need to know:

• The amount of power that you want to pass through it.
• The amount of time that you need protection for. 

For most small businesses, you just need a few minutes as a grace period to allow you to shut your servers down safely. 

When you buy a UPS, don't forget that you will need to replace the batteries every couple of years. 

Online Backup

Most companies take some form of backup of their servers, but I am always surprised by the number of companies that still rely on tape and disk backup backup. It’s not that I dispute whether tape backups work or not. It’s rather that the only truly reliable solution for business continuity is to have offsite backup, and to automate that process rather than relying on the office manager remembering to insert the tape and take it home with them at night. The time when you will need that backup most is in the event that you are unlucky enough to suffer a fire or a flood, and the best way to ensure that you get access to your data after a fire is to use online backup. Admittedly, you need to have a high speed internet connection to use online backup reliably, but they are more widely available now. If you haven’t already made the investment in online backup, now is a good time to do so.

You can of course spend much more on business continuity than simply investing in online backup and provision of a decent UPS system, but this is sufficient for most small businesses. It’s a small price to pay for peace of mind that your business can recover as quickly as possible when bad things happen. 

Why Good IT Security Is Important For Small Businesses.

Why do small businesses need to worry about IT security? We all understand why banks need to have good security … they’ve got our money, and if they get hacked they are probably out of business. What’s the worst that can happen if you don’t have good security as a small business?

The truth is that the damage caused to a small business by poor security may not be as catastrophic as a bank getting hacked, but the consequences of poor security are still painful .. and costly. 

The first thing you’ve got to realise is that security isn’t just about getting your web site hacked. In fact, a good proportion of what we do in managing IT support for our customers involves managing network security. 

How does IT Security impact small businesses?

The problem for small businesses is internet malware. Malware is “bad” software that is unintentionally downloaded from hacked web sites that seeks out bugs in software that is installed on your PC. Unless your PC is kept updated with the latest security updates, malware can use these bugs to upload malicious software which can turn your PC into a spam sender or steal your internet passwords. The first you are likely to know that you have malware on your PC is when things start to grind to a halt, and this is the point at which bad security starts to cost you money. 

Few things are more frustrating than a PC on a go-slow because of a malware infection. It gets in the way of doing your work and causes frustration. You can try running applications such as Malwarebytes to lean it up, but you then lose your PC for the best part of a day while it runs a full scan of your system. Critically all of this is taking place when you want to be getting on dealing with your clients, costing you money with every minute that goes by … and you haven’t even called your IT support company yet!

How to keep internet malware at bay.

The answer is to make sure that your PC’s and servers are kept updated and maintained on a regular basis. If you’re a small business without a dedicated IT Manager that can be a tall order. In reality you are better off outsourcing to a managed service provide who will use automation software to run manage and update your systems remotely. Using automation cuts the cost of keeping your PC’s properly updated and in good working order. More importantly, it’s not your problem!

So don’t discount security just because you’re a small business. It’s just as important to you as it is to bigger businesses. You just see the benefits a different way. For you, IT security translates into reliability of your PC’s and servers.

Planning For Cloud Computing Success

There is much to be said in favour of cloud computing, especially if you are a small business without the in-house skills to manage your IT systems properly. Irrespective of all of the arguments on how cloud computing saves you money, many companies who adopt cloud systems do so because they buy in to the idea that they will no longer have to worry about buying hardware, upgrading it, and making sure that their business information is properly backed up. However it is implemented,  outsourcing IT is increasingly seen as an easy win for businesses.

Furthermore, in these days of flexible working, your office becomes wherever you want it to be, since you can access your company information from a café or airport lounge equally as well as you can from your own desk.  

Nonetheless, if you decide that cloud computing is right for your business, you shouldn’t rush headlong into it. Change can be a painful process, and your implementation needs to be planned to make sure that you set off on the right foot and avoid push-back from your staff. Involoving your employees from day 1 is hugely important. They are after all the people who earn money for your company, and they may have genuine concerns that you will need to address prior to implementation. 

Plan For Change

When you move your business applications to the cloud you may well find that it requires minor changes to working practices for your staff. You may for instance be moving to a newer version of your business software, or the cloud version may work slightly differently to the way that your staff have been used to working previously. Alternatively, if you are looking to move to a cloud CRM system, you may be making changes to streamline your business processes. In any event, your new cloud based system should be installed as a pilot in parallel to your current systems for sufficient time to allow training and acceptance testing to take place.   

Security

If you are moving to the cloud, you have to consider the security of your data. Under the data Protection Act, you should not take your clients’ personal information outside the EU, so make sure that you know where your information is being stored. You also need to take into account that your data is now being stored on another company’s systems, so should you be taking additional security measures such as encrypting your information, or protecting access to your cloud systems using strong authentication?

One size certainly doesn’t fit all companies when it comes to cloud migration, but you need to make sure that you get the process right for your business. As with any IT project, planning for success will pay dividends.

What Can Small Businesses Learn From McDonalds

It’s hard to imagine a high street without a McDonalds today, but I have to hold my hand up to remembering the first time that the Golden Arches appeared on our high Streets in the 1970’s. In particular I remember going up into Birmingham with my girlfriend at the time and as it came up to 1pm we went looking for somewhere to eat. We found a busy traditional café just off New Street so we went in and took a seat.

It was a busy day and the café was clearly short staffed ; plates remained on tables for a little too long, and it took an eternity for the waitress to come to take our order. After another 20 minutes any thoughts of lust I had for the one I was with had turned to thoughts of lunch that I was now desperate to eat but which had still not arrived, so we just left and headed off down New Street and into McDonalds. 

The contrast couldn’t have been more stark. We were greeted with smiles and the familiar “Can I help anyone?”, and within minutes I was gratefully tucking into my quarter pounder with cheese. Who knows if my order in the overstretched café ever saw the light of day!

Needless to say, the café on New Street that had so miserably failed my expectations is now long gone, but McDonalds  … well, we all know!

So what has all this got to do with IT Support, small businesses, or anything that could be relevant to you and me? The answer is simple. McDonalds hasn’t grown into the megacorporation that they are today by serving the tastiest burgers in town. They managed that by being the restaurant that served you fastest, wished you a nice day as they gave you your food, cleared the tables more quickly than anybody else, swept the floor more often than anyone else, and even cleaned up the pavement outside the restaurant more often than anyone else. They also know their market better than any other company on the planet. See, I didn’t mention what I thought of their food once!

It’s called customer service, and in the battle against big companies it’s the only competitive advantage that many of us have. If you are a small business owner, I firmly believe that you need to bake good customer service into everything that your company does. If you give good service, you become a supplier of a commodity that is in short supply, and what's more you will get recommended. What's not to like about free advertising by your customers? 

So next week, just give a little more to your customers. It could repay you ten times over.

A Little IT Maintenance Saves A Lot Of IT Support

If you are a small business, you need your IT to work. As a small business owner myself, I believe we're in fact more reliant on technology than big business. Let’s face it, we really need to sweat our assets to help us to compete with big companies, and technology enables us to do this. We can deliver better customer service than the big boys, and react every bit as quickly as they can ... just as long as our IT keeps running.

Since the onset of the internet age, the speed of everyone’s business process has accelerated beyond anybody’s expectations due to email and E-commerce, so it hurts when your IT fails. What’s more I’m convinced that technology has its own sixth sense that tells it exactly the right time to throw a hissy fit to cause us the most inconvenience. It can be when I have to get a quote out, get some marketing material together for a deadline, or just when I want to clear everything up before I go home. That’s when the technology gremlin strikes! Fortunately I have my own support department at hand that I can call on when I need them. If you’re a small law firm, accountancy practice or marketing company, you may not have such a luxury!

When we get a call from a new customer, it is almost inevitably because ”the wheels have fallen off” their IT. We have even experienced one business owner who was scared of re-booting his Windows server in case it didn’t come back on again! I can understand business owners not wanting to take their time managing IT, but surely living in fear of a power spike is no way to run a business?

The idiom that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure is especially true when it comes to IT. If you only ever spend money on your IT when it fails I can only guarantee you that your IT will keep failing, and we all know the problems when that happens. Invoices don’t get issued, customer service can grind to a halt, and your sales person suddenly becomes an impromptu IT engineer. He may well know a bit about computers, but shouldn’t he be looking after your clients or chasing down new business? Your IT will work better and more reliably if you spend money on preventative maintenance. That way you will experience fewer failures, your blood pressure will be lower, and your salesman can get back on the telephone.

Am I biased? Well, I run an IT support company, of course I am! … But it’s hardly rocket science is it?

How Can Online CRM Help Your Company To Communicate Better?

Given that 80% of your business comes from 20% of your customers, you clearly need to take good care of your client base. Yet sales, customer service and finance functions within a company fail to join up, and this can be bad for business. Knowledge is power, especially when it comes to customer relationships, and installing a CRM provides a simple means of sharing relevant information about your customers that will help your employees to do their job better. 

Let’s take three hypothetical situations to demonstrate my point:

• A salesman is chasing a customer for a new order, but is unaware that the customer has unpaid invoices that are more than 90 days overdue .

• An engineer arrives on site to perform an installation, but has no knowledge of discussions between the customer and his salesperson on the detail of the work to be carried out so the work is completed incorrectly.

• An accounts administrator is chasing for payment of an invoice that has been issued, but is not aware that the contract has not been able to be completed because the goods are being returned as faulty.

In each case these people may have acted differently if customer communications had been joined up using a CRM system. The salesperson may have insisted on cash in advance;  the engineer wouldn’t have had to revisit an installation, and the accounts administrator may not have lost a customer for appearing incompetent.

What Else Does A CRM Do?

Of course there is a lot more to a CRM than providing a central point of reference for customer communications for everyone in your company. A CRM can join up your entire business process including:

• Gathering web  and social marketing leads directly into your sales process.
• Generating documentation for quotations, orders, invoices and customer service.
• Producing business pipeline reports  to assist in business planning.
• Analysing the relative profitability of all of your products / business .
• Measuring the performance of your sales staff.
• Evaluating the return on investment of your marketing campaigns.

You can of course do all of this by extracting information from multiple sources and crunching numbers through a spreadsheet, but at a far greater cost over time. It is the integration and automation of your entire business process that is the true prize of a successful CRM deployment.

How To Remove Malware and Viruses From Your PC

Malware is the scourge of the Internet to the extent that Google discovers over 9,500 new malicious web sites and provides 300,000 download warnings every day. Once installed, malware either feeds you advertising, feeds your browsing activity back to advertisers as profiling information, or if you’re really unlucky it waits for you to visit your online banking site and redirects you off to a malicious web site where it will collect your login details.

How Do You Know You Have Malware On Your PC?

When you start to see browser windows popping up with advertising messages for no apparent reason, you can be pretty sure that you have some malware on your PC. Otherwise, you may not see any visible sign of malware other than your PC grinding gradually to a halt. It turns out that malware is very sociable and once it finds a home on your PC, it will usually invite a few friends over to party! By the time that the malware party on your PC is in full swing, you will find that it takes forever to boot up, shut down, or open any application. That’s usually the time when you reach for the phone to call in your IT support company!

My Top 3 Malware Removal Tools

There are 3 tools that you can turn to when you think you have malware on your PC:

• Spybot Search and Destroy – Probably the most popular malware scanner – includes real time scanning.

• Malwarebytes – My personal favourite malware removal software.

• Combofix – If all else fails, try Combofix. It provides heavy-duty malware removal.

Malwarebytes has been my preferred malware removal tool for some time now.  Usually it will find whatever is on the PC and removes it in one full scan, although I always recommend running 2 scans to make sure that you haven’t got some “smart” malware which includes a hidden component that reinstalls itself whenever it finds that the main program has been deleted.

Sometimes however you will come across an infected PC that proves impossible to clean. When that happens, you just have to back up your data if you can and reach for the Windows installation DVD to reinstall.

How To Stop Malware Getting Onto Your PC

Malware finds its way onto your PC when you visit a compromised web site. If your PC is not kept 100% up to date with the latest security patches, criminals and cyber-scoundrels are able to exploit bugs in older versions of programs to plant their software on your PC.

Unfortunately there is no easy way of telling good web sites from bad ones. Diligence in IT maintenance combined with robust IT Security really is your only defence, and if you don’t have the time to take these tasks on yourself, then you really need to find an IT support company who can help you.

Web Security – How Do You Know If A Site Is Safe?

The Internet can be a dangerous place! We all love to scour the Internet for a bargain, but beware the bad stuff out there that can steal your credit card details, Paypal login, or turn your PC into a “zombie” that can be used by spammers and password thieves. Web sites that have been hacked and are being used to disseminate malicious software don’t advertise the fact .. in fact the web site owner probably won’t even know about it.

How Big A problem Is Web Security?

If you visit a compromised web site and your PC is missing the latest updates, you stand a good chance of ending up with software on your PC that you didn’t ask for. The problem is that it isn’t going to introduce itself and shake your hand! A bit like the neighbour you didn’t invite to your barbecue, it came along uninvited and it’s going to make a nuisance of itself.

How Do I Know If My PC Is Infected?

You are unlikely to recognise that your PC has been infected straight away. Internet malware can sit there silently waiting for you to connect to your online bank account so that it can steal your login details or send out so much traffic that it clogs up your entire network as we saw with one of our customers recently. Eventually though your PC will become unusable as more malware gets downloaded at which point you need to call your IT support company.

Which Are The Most Dangerous Web Sites

It's not just “Sex and Drugs and Rock and Roll”  web sites that are potentially dangerous. According to a Symantec study in 2012, 61% of malicious web sites are regular web sites that have been compromised and infected with malicious code.

The Top 5 Most Exploited Web Site Categories - % Of Total Number Of Infected Websites

1.       Blogs / Web Communications - 19.8%

2.       Hosting / Personal Hosted Sites – 15.6%

3.       Business / Economy – 10%

4.       Shopping – 7.7%

5.       Education / Reference – 6.9%

Whilst these figures are based on 2011 data, the percentages won’t have changed much, and new around 9,500 malicious web sites are being found by Google every day.

How To Protect Your Computers Against Internet Malware

Home users need to make sure that their security is kept up-to-date. Make sure that you enable automatic updates for Windows Updates and keep applications such as Java and Adobe Acrobat updated as well. Malware exploits bugs in software that is installed on your PC to upload malicious code to your system, and regular updates are your best defence. There is no  need to shell out large amounts of money for security software though. Microsoft Security Essentials is free and good enough for home use. 

If you are a business, the same principles apply, but you need to take your IT security a little more seriously:

• Make sure that all Windows / Java / Adobe updates are applied to your computers on a weekly basis.
• Make sure you run commercial security software.
• Monitor your PC’s for tell-tale signs of trouble.
• Use web security software to block access to known infected sites as well as pornographic / illegal / non-business material

A little common sense also goes a long way. If you are asked to click on a link in an email, or a Facebook / Twitter post, engage brain before clicking. Is the person that it came from likely to have sent you a link to ”Some hilarious pics of you”? If in doubt, don’t click! 

Is Google Apps for Business Right For Your Company?

“How can I use cloud computing in my business?” is probably the number one IT question that I get asked. It can be a hard  question to answer because the cloud isn’t just one technology, and it all depends on what you need from your IT. Very often, small businesses owners simply want to store files in the cloud and share them with colleagues and clients, and I increasingly find myself suggesting to people that they should at least look at Google Apps for Business.

Google Apps for Business is the cloud equivalent of the Swiss Army knife.  It has a number of components:

Google Mail

Most people know about Google Mail, but many people aren’t aware of Google Apps for Business which works pretty much the same as the personal version of Google Mail, but you use your own domain (e.g. clearview.co.uk) instead of the Google domain of gmail.com.  You can also personalise the system with your company logo (see below).

Google Calendar

Google Apps provides a  calendar to help you organise your time. You can share your calendar with your colleagues and vice versa. In addition to scheduling meetings, Google’s “Tasks” component allows you to create a “To-Do” list which I keep on the right hand side of my screen. It’s no substitute for a CRM system, but it helps me to organise my activity for the day.

Even if all you got was email and calendar, surely Google Apps for Business has to be the cloud’s biggest bargain at £3.30 per user per month for businesses, and absolutely free for non-profit organisations. What’s more, if you have grown attached to using Microsoft Outlook as your email and calendar software, there’s no need to change. You can configure Google Apps to synchronise all of your email and calendar entries with your Outlook client.

But that’s not all! You can also use Google Apps for Business to store documents online and synchronise them with a folder on your laptop / desktop PC using Google Drive.

Google Drive

Google Drive allows you to store and share your files online and integrates neatly with Google Mail. There are two ways to access your Google Drive Files. Firstly, you can download and install an install programme from your Google account which creates a synchronisation folder on your laptop or PC. You can then drag and drop files and folders into your Google Drive folder and synchronise them with your Google Account.

  

Secondly, you can upload files to Google Drive using a web browser. This is a simple “point and click” operation that allows you to upload files to your Google account from any internet connected device.

Once a file or folder has been uploaded to your Google Drive account, you can share it using a right mouse click and clicking on the “Share” menu option. Files and folders can be shared with colleagues in your own organisation as well as with clients and business partners. You get the option to send an email to the person that you have shared the file or folder with.

Word Processing and Spreadsheets for Free!

In addition to email, calendar, file sharing and collaboration, Google Apps also provides you with a basic word processor, spreadsheet and drawing application at no extra cost. They aren’t as sophisticated as the Microsoft applications, or even Open Source suites such as LibreOffice, but if you only need basic word processing and spreadsheet functions, they do the job. I tend to compose everything in my favourite Office suite and just use Google for storage and collaboration. 

Great Value Cloud Computing For Small Businesses

Having moved over from Microsoft Exchange about 18 months ago, I'm a big advocate of Google Apps for Business. It's great value for money and there are ways that you can overlay automatic encryption to ensure data privacy. If you are a start-up and looking for a low cost way to store / back up data files in the cloud, as well as share files with your colleagues and clients, it's hard to fault.

Proper IT Maintenance Is Good For Business.

Don't you just want to tear your hair out when your PC goes all cronky on you? Computers may just be a handful of printed circuit boards, a processor and a disk drive or two, but they sure seem to know the very worst time to embark on a go-slow, or even blue screen if you are one of the unlucky ones hit by a bad Windows update or some malware downloaded from the Internet. According to Brother International’s Small Business Survey, business owners now recognise that IT failure is a real drain on their bottom line profits:

• 75 per cent of small business owners indicate that a computer failure is more disruptive than an employee being taken sick.

• 77 per cent stated that a technical fault has hit their bottom line profits through missed deadlines or lost business opportunities.

• 66 per cent of small business owners say they are frequently confused by the technical tools at their disposal to run their business.

• 86 per cent additionally admitted to losing staff productivity due to technical problems.

• 31 per cent of respondents went so far as to say that they would give up a week’s worth of their hard earned holiday to make sure that they would never be hit by technical malfunctions again .

While business owners who felt the need to safeguard cash to withstand the effect of a further economic downturn increased from 44 to 48%, 52% see that investing in technology can help to give them a competitive advantage in their market.

From my perspective, I see that there are 3 key points for small businesses:

Proper Technology Management Produces Bigger Profits - Technology, and specifically proper management of technology can help businesses to increase their profits. If you can manage your technology properly, it will fundamentally fail less frequently. Taking care of technology will help you to take care of business!

If You’re Not a Tech Whizz, Find Someone Who Is! - As a business person, if you aren’t tech-savvy, you to partner with a company that is. If you can find the right IT support partner, they should be able to advise you on ways that you can use technology to best serve the needs of your business.

Technology Business Wins Start At The Top - 52 percent of people are right! You can use technology to make your business run more efficiently. The desire and the drive to change business processes for the better however needs to come from the business owner, both to make sure that your IT company produces the answer to the right business problem, as well as to promote adoption within the business.

You can download the Brother Small business Survey here:

There should be exciting times ahead for small businesses who have survived the recession, and technology can help you to become a lean, mean business machine. 

Protecting Your Online Privacy Part 2

Welcome to part two of my personal battle against pesky password thieves. Don't be the one that becomes their next victim! Last week I explained briefly the danger of password hacking of web sites such as Amazon and Paypal. Nobody wants to have to remember multiple passwords, so they reuse their Paypal and Amazon passwords for other web sites such as Twitter and Facebook. The problem is that if your password for one web site is stolen, you could be the next victim of online fraud.

Remember The Golden Rule .. Don’t Re-Use Passwords!!

It is a real pain to have to use a different password for each of your online logins, but once you have been bitten, you realise that it’s worth it. My heart stopped when I saw that someone had transferred £680 out of my Paypal account, so it’s not going to happen again in a hurry. Realistically, you need to keep a spreadsheet of your passwords for your online logins. Not only that, but you need to make them good passwords including upper and lower case letters as well as special characters. 

My Password System

I worked out a system that I am happy to share with you because it works for me. You can adapt it and make it more complex. It all depends on how obsessive you want to be about it!

My recipe for password security has three simple ingredients:

• A number of 4 or 5 word phrases
• Some special characters that you alter for each login
• A string of character that you are going to remember. Make it the first part of your partner’s vehicle registration plate or something equally memorable.

You then create a system using a spreadsheet and a little imagination. Here’s one I cooked up earlier based on the first letters of the words in Beatles songs:

Needless to say you don’t have to use Beatles songs. You could use book titles, proverbs, recipes or just about anything else the will give you a number of phrases of 4-5 words. Just devise your own system, work out where you are going to put your special characters, which letters will be upper case and which will be lower case and generate as many passwords as you need. If you want to be really fastidious you may want to use an application such as 7-Zip to store the spreadsheet in a password protected zip file. Just make sure that you can remember that password … and make it a good one!

How To Protect Your Online Privacy

If you have read my blog recently, you will know that I had my PayPal account hacked a couple of weeks ago. It’s pretty embarrassing for me to get caught out since I have been involved in IT Security for over 10 years, but it shows that if it can happen to me, it can also happen to most of you who are reading my blog. So here are some helpful tips to ensure that you aren't the next one to end up with egg on your face and a hacker in your PayPal account.

The Online Golden Rule That I Broke!

I’m pretty convinced that my password was compromised because I made the schoolboy error of using the same password for PayPal as I had used for another Internet site. That site was probably hacked specifically to get hold of the web site's password file so that the hacker could try the email addresses and passwords on shopping sites such as Amazon and PayPal. When they tried my email address and password in PayPal, they would have thought that they had struck lucky. Fortunately for me, I saw the email payment confirmation from PayPal on my iPad, so I reported the incident to PayPal and changed the password within 20 minutes. Credit goes to PayPal who acted to return my £680 within 48 hours.

How Easily Can Hackers Get Your Passwords?

It is distressingly easy for Internet criminals to get hold of your PayPal / Amazon passwords. All they need to do is get hold of your password for another Internet site and then simply try it on Amazon, PayPal, or any number of other Internet shopping sites. If you are a Twitter user, have you ever seen any emails like this one?

If you have, and you clicked on the link, you probably also gave the bad guys your Twitter password, and if you use your Twitter password for PayPal, Amazon etc. please stop reading this blog post and go and change those passwords now!

The Golden Rule … DON’T RE-USE PASSWORDS!!

You may be careful not to click on “dodgy” links, but that won’t stop the bad guys from hacking one of the web sites that you belong to and getting your password, and don’t think that adding a “!” or a “£” to the start and end of your pet stick insect’s name is sufficient protection either. Password cracking software is pretty sophisticated now and will probably crack it in a few seconds (unless your stick insect is called Sy900$r5%)!

So How Can You Stay Secure Online?

The simple answer is that you need a system to provide you with strong, unique passwords for your online web site logins, and next week I will be happy to share mine with you. Don’t forget to come back next week!

Can Mobile Computing Increase Your Company's Productivity?

This week I am taking a week off! I am delighted to offer up an article by Paul Hillis of Thinkgrid who are one of our cloud computing service partners.

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You might not have even noticed, but gradually, the IT Systems you use and your workforce are embracing mobile computing. Look at the devices your staff use to communicate, compared with say, 5 years ago – now they will more likely use laptops, tablets, smartphones as opposed to PC’s under their desks. 

Next, take a look at what kind of applications they are using – if they are new applications to your business they are probably much more likely to be web browser based or app based than static applications that can only be accessed in the office.

For quite a lot of organisations, this seems to have just ‘happened’ without any directive or strategy behind it. Often the first step for an organisation becoming mobile in its operation is the MD wants to get his work email on his iPhone, like the rest of the lads at the golf club. However, proactively considering a mobility strategy is something you might want to consider, as there are many benefits to be had, as well as pitfalls that would be best avoided.

The first step in considering such a strategy is looking at your workforce to decide what they do, how they do it and what allowing them to be mobile would bring to the table. It might be the case that if they had the chance, they would happily update that tender they have been working on, or fire off a few emails at the weekend if they had the chance to do so.

The next step is to look at what you need to give them to work effectively in a mobile setting, and if doing so is feasible. It may be that just giving them access to email would give them the ability to do 90% of what they can do when they are in the office, or it may be that they would need to give them access to the complex software and databases to match what they do when they are at their desk.

Allowing your staff to be mobile can potentially bring lots or productivity benefits to your organisations. You can get closer to your customers, give your staff a better work/life balance, attract staff from further afield, plus get staff to put more into their jobs. There are plenty of technologies out there that will allow you to reap these benefits while mitigating the potential risks associated with going mobile too.

No matter where your organisation is on mobility - Whether your organisation is static, singular office, 9-5, or all working from home using cloud applications, tablet and virtual offices, it’s well worth taking a step back and to see if whether your business could become more efficient and more profitable by embracing mobile computing.

Dude - A virus ate my customer's internet connection!

Did you think that viruses were a thing of the past that you don't have to worry about any more? Well here is a story from one of our customers that shows that the Internet really can be a dangerous place even for the most security conscious companies. Understandably, businesses focus on making money rather than IT security. The problem is that when you get a malware infection (which many of you will understand better as viruses), you may not know about it, but that doesn’t mean that they can’t cause problems for your company.

Recently, one of our largest customers was having problems with a web security system that they had bought about a year ago. They have around 2,000 IT users and a sizable internet connection, but something was bringing their system to a grinding halt, and quite a lot of the web connections had very little to do with their line of business!

Since they have a support contract with us we held our hands up to do some investigation as to what was causing the problem, and it soon became obvious that 75% of their network traffic was coming from a single PC which had obviously been infected with malware and was generating huge amounts of network traffic which was clogging up their Internet connection.

The graphs below show you what happened as soon as the infected PC was removed from the network. It’s amazing what one infected PC can do!:

Web connections per hour dropped from 20,000 to 5000.

Blocked connections per hour dropped from 14,000 to 0.

Connections per hour to “malicious” sites dropped from 20,000 to 0.

We will never know how the malware ended up on our client’s PC. They were probably just unlucky and visited a hacked web site that took advantage of a missing security update to infect the PC. What it does demonstrate though is the importance of making sure that your PC’s are kept updated to minimise the likelihood of picking up a malware infection. 

Just imagine the devastating effect that a similar incident could have on your company if you rely on cloud services for your line of business applications. It just goes to show that as you grow more and more reliant on the Internet to run our businesses, you will need to make sure that your security is up to scratch. 

Had Your Paypal Account Hacked? Join The Club!

Last Thursday night I was sitting at home watching the TV when my iPad on the arm of the chair went “Bing”! The email notification said something about a Paypal transaction which (being a cautious sort of chap) I thought was worth checking. I'm used to seeing phishing emails, and Google Apps has a very good spam filter,  so this particular email was worth a second look.

When I opened the email a shiver ran down my spine. It was a notification from Paypal that £689 had been paid from my Paypal account to someone whose email address meant nothing to me. What was worse, this email looked genuine. I immediately fired up my laptop, logged on to Paypal and there it was staring me in the face. £680 had been paid out of my account using the card that I had hooked up to it.

The crafty beggars had timed the transaction to go through just after 10 pm when the Paypal phonelines closed, so I reported the unauthorised transaction through the Resolution Centre. Paypal sent through an email to confirm that my dispute had been registered and I sat back and crossed my fingers.

To their credit, within 2 days I received confirmation from Paypal that my £689 would be credited back, so with a big sigh of relief I was able to think of the lessons I had learnt from the experience.

How was my account hacked?
I’ll never know for sure, but the only two possibilities that make any sense are that:

• I had a password stealing trojan on my PC or
• Another site where I used the same password had been hacked and they tried out all of the usernames and passwords on Paypal.

If you ever have the misfortune of suffering a Paypal hack, you will need to cover both of these options. The only way to make sure that any trojan on your PC is no longer there is to back up your data and re-load your PC from the Windows CD. Is there anyone reading this who doesn’t have the Windows CD for their PC? If so, please go back to wherever you got the PC from and find out how you get one. It’s your ultimate “Get out of jail” card.

You then absolutely must change all of your critical passwords (eBay, Paypal, Amazon etc). It may be a pain, but if you have already been hacked, you have no choice. Paypal force you to change your password as part of their “disputed transaction” process anyway.

One of our engineers quite rightly gave me a hard time about my passwords, and I spent an amount of time this weekend working out a new system. Your Amazon / Paypal etc passwords really should be unique, and you need to avoid standard words and phrases that can be cracked pretty easily anyway. Use something such as the first letters in song lyrics that you can remember together with special characters. Having been stung once, I damned if I’m going to give anyone another chance of nicking my hard earned cash and neither should you. You can see the system that I have now chosen to use here. I hope it helps.

Online CRM Part 4 - Managing your sales opportunities with Workbooks Online

Are you finding it difficult to manage your sales process using Microsoft Outlook, Word or Excel? It’s not that you can’t use these standard tools to organise your sales process, there are just better tools available. If your time is precious to you, then you can work more productively and make life easier for yourself by installing a proper Customer Relationship Management (CRM ) system such as Workbooks Online.

CRM Essentials

For me, there are a number of essential activities that I need to be made as simple as possible:

Company / Contact Search

Any CRM system that doesn’t allow you to find the company or person quickly wouldn’t even make it off the starting blocks. Workbooks provides a search box that allows you to perform a “Google-like” search for whatever it is you are looking for. You are presented with a list of matching search results and you simply click on the right one to go to the record you need.

Recording Notes and Activities
Excel Spreadsheets and Outlook fall short for contact management because they don’t provide a simple-to-use way of recording telephone call and meeting notes. Knowledge is power and your staff will be better informed and provide a better service to your clients and customers if they have access to meeting and conversation notes when talking to your customers. Workbooks allows you to record details of every interaction that your employees have with your clients / customers and make them available to everybody.

Activity Scheduling
A CRM needs to help you to plan your time by allowing you to schedule tasks telephone calls and meetings with your existing and prospective customers and provide you with reminders for these activities. With Workbooks, you can schedule events together with notes to remind you of the purpose of the call / meeting etc. You will be presented with a schedule of reminders of your pending tasks when you log into Workbooks.

Quoting
Whilst you can use Excel / Word Templates to generate quotes, by storing your product / service book within the system, Workbooks simplifies the process of drawing up quotations by eliminating the need to search for product information in separate databases / spreadsheets and pre-populating the quote with the right contact information.

Pipeline Management
Pipeline Management is a critical activity for any business, but without an effective CRM tool, they can take a long time to produce manually. Workbooks automatically provides sales people, managers and business owners with complete visibility of all business opportunities as well as where they are in the deal process.

The video below provides you with a quick overview of how you can use Workbooks CRM to manage your customer / client data:

If your current customer management tools no longer meet your needs, then let us know. We would love to be able to help you to implement the right tools to help you grow your business.