Technology Advisor Blog

What's the difference between last minute shoppers and those not investing in cybersecurity for their small to medium sized businesses? Not very much! In both cases, impulsive decision making could potentially drain your finances and blow up in your face because you didn’t take the time to invest in safety protocols.
The holidays require a lot of time obtaining gifts for family and loved ones, and scammers are in the not-so-festive mood to try and drain your bank accounts. Black Friday is coming up with eye-catching sales, scammers are utilizing this time for all tactics to trick you into handing your personal information to them in the veil of receiving the ‘best sale of the year’.

Between November and December, whether for work or the holidays, flights can be the most stressful part of anyone’s day when traveling. In most cases, arriving at the airport means keeping up to date with flight times, terminal changes, boarding times, checked luggage, TSA security, and arriving hours before your flight just to get through all checkpoints efficiently.
As stressful as it is, scammers are weaponizing the high emotional stress circling around flight schedules and doing the extra digging for your checked bag tags. Coming down the runway, travelers must be aware of fake airline texts, emphasizing cancelled flights and changes to be made expeditiously. With the world we live in, it’s best to keep your flight itinerary, luggage tags, and ticket information to yourself.

Coordinating a Wishlist for the holidays with your friends, family and loved ones can be challenging. Especially when no two people are the same. In a lot of cases, whether you utilize your time management right during the season or not, (it’s completely understandable if you don’t, it’s a stressful time in the work-life balance realm), sometimes the best gift, when you don’t know what to get, is a gift card.

In Ekaru’s previous blog, we went over how typos can unexpectedly lead you to mimicked websites designed by hackers to steal your personal information. But what if I told you that on top of having to be hyper vigilant of spelling, you also need to check a URL’s characters if all letters are from the same font?
Tricks hackers use to scam unsuspecting individuals usually consist of spam texts, phishing emails impersonating reputable companies, scams claiming you owe a specific amount of money, creating a sense of urgency - all are attempts to fatigue you and steal your information. For some, these tricks have become easy to spot due to recognizing the signs from their intensive cybersecurity awareness training. However, bad actors use evolving technology and strategies to improve their game and become harder and harder to detect.
One of their strategies to become harder to detect, is the usage of visuals in random letters from different fonts. This is a term we call Internalized Domain Name (IDN) Homograph attack.

As we enter Halloween, the larger national holidays such as Thanksgiving and Christmas are closing in. It’s a stressful time of year, causing a lot of folks to not act rationally how they usually would. Scammers are aware of this more than ever and will do whatever it takes for you to fall into their trap. How do they try to get you? Sometimes it’s not as obvious, sometimes its overlooking how a website HTTP link is typed out incorrectly. The term for this type of social engineering scam is called Typo squatting.

As many of us have our head in the clouds for Halloween that is on a Friday this year, something spookier has grabbed folks’ attention this week. On Monday October 20^th, people noticed that something was off. Social media apps taking minutes to send messages or to send at all, streaming shows not loading properly, difficulties in sending deposits through Venmo, or even grabbing a drink from Starbucks and their POS systems are down. The cause: AWS had an outage that lasted for over half a day on Monday (great way to start off the week amiright?) For many, frustration and eagerness took over as they could only wait for this to be resolved. But just how many internet services and applications were affected?

When keeping business operations alive, security is essential. Security isn’t just strong passwords of 16 or more characters across multiple different websites/accounts, or MFA, it’s a deeper-rooted step to take with your networks to prevent most cybersecurity threats.
From a 2021 Verizon study, “61% of small to mid-size businesses experienced a cyberattack in 2021”. In 2023 73% of small businesses faced cyber-attacks. In 2024, 94% of small to medium sized businesses faced a cybersecurity attack. The number keeps increasing each year with small businesses affected. Something must be done to protect businesses from such cyber attacks.

The mindset has probably come up multiple times in conversation; “I’m a small business, I’m too small to be known for hackers to try and target me”. It’s not exactly if it happens, it all matters as to when. Don’t wait until that ‘when’ turns into ‘today’ when you receive a socially engineered scam that looks legit. Scams are becoming harder to identify, when you are not investing in proper cybersecurity measures, the wrong people will notice you do not have the tools or budget.

Are you someone that does not want any trace of work on your phone with the intent of separate work from home? Well, you’re not alone.
It’s understandable that you would want to have a personal device that has no affiliation to work or receive any work-related phone calls. However, with threat actors ruthlessly and creatively generating scams for folks to fall victim to, it’s important to understand the benefits of using multi factor authentication across multiple devices.

October is here, and threat actors are ramping up their attacks to the point where its… spooky.
While Halloween is coming up, Thanksgiving and Christmas are also on the horizon, it’s more evident than ever we must remain hypervigilant and not fall for these intricate phishing attempts.

In September, many folks and including some of us in the office, experienced a rise in spam (Vishing) phone calls. You may be wondering ‘Where are all these unknown numbers coming from?” If you’re like me, when you notice an unknown caller ID notify your phone, you never pick up. However, not everyone is like that. However, the Ekaru team is here to teach you all about cold calling scams, how to identify them, reasons why they are potentially occurring, and the steps/services we provide to help protect yourself and others from falling into their trap.

When businesses become further established and credible within their community, the conversations of increasing security measures, budgeting, and overall work morale begin to initiate for further discussion. Understandably, maintaining a growing business can be challenging and shifting your priorities, sometimes causing the complacent “My business won’t get hacked, I’m safe it won’t happen to me.” This type of thinking can backfire especially if you’re not paying close enough attention - there is no "Security by Obscurity"!  At the end of the day, we have all been there and sometimes had to pay for the consequences.
Since there are so many aspects to a business that can pull you in several directions at once it’s hard to pinpoint where to begin conversations on cybersecurity needs. That’s where Ekaru comes in to provide you with the best IT solutions in the Boston Massachusetts area. To make informed decisions about your cybersecurity needs aligned within your budget.