Technology Advisor Blog

This past week a Massachusetts school district paid $10,000 ransom to unlock its files after a cyber attack.  The Police Chief commented that there is no further investigation of this crime because solving this crime is "impossible". This is unfortunately a sign of the times.

You need to send an important update or invitation to all your clients and you're ready to hit the "send" key.  Don't!  

We hope you're keeping up with organizing your "Inbox" in Outlook using different folders to group your mail.  You may also want to organize your "Sent Items" folder into different sub-folders.  Perhaps you have some company related emails you want to group or perhaps you want to track your sent items by major projects.  If you add a sub-folder, you may be alarmed to see that all the mail is listed with your name.  As you can see below, my messages in my newly created "TEST FOLDER" folder for sent messages are all listed by who sent the message.  Me!  Not helpful.  I already know who sent them!

Facebook is in the news recently for some not so good reasons.  In case you missed it, a research firm called Cambridge Analytica harvested the personal information of 50 million Facebook users, and used this to "influence" the Presidential election.  After days of silence, Facebook executives have finally come forward and would like users to think that this was an isolated case by some bad actors, but the real problem here is that this actually hits at the core of the Facebook business model.  

Everyone thinks they won't click on a phishing link, but when we run tests, there's always someone who does!

At the HIMSS Healthcare IT Conference last week in Las Vegas, Roger Severino, Director of the US Department of Health and Human Services Office for Civil Rights (OCR), the HIPAA enforcement agency, made some news when he said that health care providers may share Protected Health Information (PHI) with patients through standard text messages. Providers must first warn their patients that texting is not secure, gain the patients’ authorization, and document the patients’ consent.  Note that this only applies to communications with patients.

I love technology!  It's amazing that I can project the screen of my laptop across the room to a large TV ... through the air!  No cables or connections needed.  Wow!

We're often asked about the different options available for Internet access.  You may be moving your office, or perhaps you need an upgrade in speed and reliability because you're going with a VoIP phone system.  You may also have moved to a cloud-based mission critical business application and you want a secondary connection for redundancy.  

It's a new year, and a great time to evaluate what's working well in your business and what could be better.  If you don't have a robust Cybersecurity plan in place for your business, now is the time to get started.   

Today is Cyber Monday, and that means that billions of transactions will occur on line.  That also means, as TransUnion puts it, "what's convenient for shoppers can also be a huge opportunity for savvy identity thieves, who steal information provided on Internet transactions for their own monetary gain."