Technology Advisor Blog

As everyone works together to "flatten the curve" via social distancing, many workers are scrambling to work from home on short notice.  We've been fielding a lot of questions and put together some of the answers here in one post.

Working remotely has become a necessity for many with the Coronavirus outbreak. The technology that enables many to work remotely is a great benefit to keeping many businesses operational, but it also poses many new risks for the security of your organization’s data. For example, if an employee-owned device (laptop, PC, etc.) is connected to the company’s network and contains a virus or malware, they could be spread to your company’s network. Additionally, it becomes more of a challenge to verify the legitimacy of emails (for example, you’re no longer right down the hall from your CEO who requested an unusual wire transfer), you may be unfamiliar with policies and procedures as they pertain to a work from home environment, and the list goes on.

Many people have been asking us about remote access options to work from home with the evolving coronavirus headlines in the news.  

Microsoft traditionally releases security patches on the second Tuesday of the month, commonly referred to as "Patch Tuesday".  This month's release includes fixes for a whopping 99 vulnerabilities, making it one of the biggest Patch Tuesdays ever.

Tuesday January 28th is Data Privacy Day.  In recognition of this day, we hosted a Computer Recycling and Hard Drive Shredding event at our office on January 23.  Often people overlook data that may be lying around the office on old equipment.  We recommend full destruction of the hard drive to make sure the data can't get into the wrong hands.  

National Cybersecurity Awareness Month is drawing to a close, and its been a great month to have a lot of conversations with local businesses in the metro Boston area.  Threats against big businesses make the headlines, but too many smaller businesses think they're "under the radar".  Not true!

Hardly a day goes by without national news related to Cybersecurity.  Target, Marriott, Yahoo, Facebook, and Home Depot have all had major incidents in the past few years.  In addition, the cities of Atlanta and Baltimore, as well as many municipalities in Texas have all been hit with Ransomware in the past two years.   Locally in the Boston area, schools, police departments, and several towns have all been hit.

Each year Verizon publishes the much-anticipated Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR).  The report is built on real-world data from 41,686 security incidents and 2,013 data breaches provided by 73 data sources, both public and private entities, spanning 86 countries worldwide.    We'll cover some of the key take-aways in this post, and if you're interested in more information, we recommend checking out the full report.  

This past month Ekaru hosted a lunch and learn with over 50 local business leaders.  Education and "the human firewall" are key components of any cybersecurity plan, and we're on a mission to educate our community.  Here's a re-cap of the event.

The IRS has issued a reminder to all practitioners that all "Professional Tax Preparers" must create a written data security plan to protect clients.