Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Businesses of all sizes lose an average of $4,500 for every minute of downtime they experience, and often that downtime is a result of data loss. Data loss can occur for a multitude of reasons, such as theft, natural disasters, software corruption, or human error. In addition, you can combat the adverse effects of data loss by creating a backup strategy.

For the last couple of years, most of us have been working from spare rooms, bar stools at our kitchen islands, the couch, and even garages retrofitted into home offices. The pandemic has changed the world of work forever. It has also dramatically changed the world of networking and events. Since March of 2020, we’ve seen networking move to virtual spaces in the following forms: Many have spent a significant amount of time and energy building up their digital presence in the last two years.

Cybersecurity isn’t just at the top of the discussion queue within the IT channel. Businesses and governments worldwide have turned a sharp eye toward rising cyber threats. Many have learned the hard way that small businesses are frequent targets of cyberattacks. The idea of “targeting a victim” itself has come into question, and more realize that widespread, indiscriminate attacks are the status quo.

"The cloud" started as a term used mainly by tech industry insiders but quickly fell into everyday use over the past several years. As more computing processes moved into off-site data centers and more organizations turned to cloud storage, the masses began to talk about migration to "the cloud." Today, the cloud is the accepted term for this type of computing and is used widely in discussions of IT infrastructure, data storage, and certain types of software.

To be clear, SMB V1 has been deprecated, unsecure, and not recommended for a long time. But Microsoft is now taking the next step towards removing it from Windows entirely. In recent years, Microsoft had stopped installing SMB1 server on all Windows versions by default; however, they have kept installing the SMB1 client in Home and Pro versions of Windows. This was meant to allow end users to connect to various devices, including NAS, which only supported SMB1.

It is widely accepted that technology is critical to modern businesses, but it’s often challenging to show the value Information Technology (IT) delivers to the entire organization. As a result, IT is still often viewed as a matter of “troubleshooting” or “customer support” rather than a genuinely strategic component of the organization.

Our previous blog provided an outline of the current phishing trends and potential consequences of not being aware of them. This article, however, takes a deep dive into a particularly dangerous type of attack. There is a large amount of phishing that is targeting webmail users on non-free mail domains in an attempt to syphon out their credentials for later use.