Firewall your business network! Don’t rely on home routers for protection!

This is pet peeve of mine: Business networks should be behind firewalls, not behind home routers!

When we visit a client location, we generally find one of the following configurations.

  • Absolutely NO firewall – just the router provided by the ISP
  • A Linksys, TrendNet, Netgear, D-Link wireless router designed for home use
  • An actual firewall such as a Cisco, WatchGuard, SonicWALL, but out of date – old, discontinued hardware, not up to date firmware
  • A quality firewall that is up to date hardware-wise but out of date with their firmware
  • A quality firewall that is both up to date and supported, and has the latest software

Unfortunately, these are listed above in the order of popularity…

That’s right, the majority of businesses have no firewall in place at all, or potentially a router designed for home use is pressed into service, and then of course, a few places purchased a firewall from a reputable business manufacturer, such as Cisco, but have either failed to keep it up to date, or that was 6 years ago and the unit is no longer supported and cannot even handle the latest security software loads.

Only a small number of businesses have done everything they can to insure their network is protected with a reputable business class firewall that is currently supported and up to date. A VERY SMALL percentage in fact.

Why the emphasis on your firewall situation? Because hackers know how to circumvent home routers and many ISP provided routers without much difficulty at all. And old, outdated firewalls are just as bad. There are kits available that hackers can download and simply run through options in an attempt to exploit known holes in inadequate and insecure firewalls. They don’t even have to flex their muscles to do this, just start the script / program and wait for the results.

If you are in the Upstate / Greenville South Carolina area and you would like to discuss firewalls for your business, please give us a call at 864-990-4748 and we will arrange a free consultation.

We are your Upstate dealer for Cisco, WatchGuard, SonicWALL and a host of other quality firewall appliances. We partner with these companies to offer sales and support for businesses just like yours!

 

Your South Carolina business credit may at risk

You would have to be living under a rock to not be aware of the fact that network security at the South Carolina Department of Revenue has been compromised and that millions of Social Security Numbers have been potentially absconded with.

What you might not know is that over 650 thousand businesses have also potentially been affected as well! The EINs or Employer Identification Numbers for businesses may be in the hands of the bad guys too.

Dun & Bradstreet Credibility Corp. is offering free credit reports for South Carolina businesses. Visit their website or call them at 1-800-279-9881 for further information.

Individuals in SC might want to jump on this: Experian contracted with the State to offer a free credit monitoring service for one year…   Sign up at www.protectmyid.com/scdor and enter the activation code SCDOR123.

Would you like to discuss network security for your business? Please call us at 864-990-4748 if you are in the Upstate South Carolina area. We can provide enterprise grade firewall appliances, network security monitoring, intrusion detection, secure wireless networks with isolated guest access, anti-virus / anti-spam, data loss prevention which monitors outgoing email for your entire company and prohibits sending of social security numbers, credit card numbers, and more.

Think your data is safe in “the cloud” during a disaster? Think again… #fantasy

The East Coast was ravaged by hurricane Sandy this week, causing still undetermined billions of dollars in damage. We will know more in the coming days, as we find out exactly how many people have perished, how many homes are permanently destroyed and how business and the economy will be affected.

Here, safe and sound in the Upstate of South Carolina, we have only felt a small portion of the devastation ourselves. FedEx and UPS packages have not made it to us yet. Flights were cancelled. Product is back-ordered while factories get their production lines back online…  Some of us have had friends or family that were in the Northeast and they are finding out that they are okay (I least I hope they are).

Then we have the one company here in the Upstate who is temporarily out of business.  I found out about it through a friend’s Facebook timeline.  This company has not been able to run their manufacturing line since the storm hit the NYC area. Three shifts a day are not working. From what I gather, they host their production data in “the cloud”, where the primary servers are located in New York City, with backups in Chicago and Los Angeles.

The NYC data center went down due to power and internet issues immediately, and the mirrored servers both captured bad images of the data from the primary servers, making them useless. One of the backup sites was able to restore to a previous image of the data within a couple hours, and then it was discovered that a key element was not being copied from the primary.  With the NYC still offline as of an hour or two ago, and no ETA of when that data center would be live again, the local company in question remains offline.

I was unable to get all of the details, but what I have goes something like this: Two years ago, a new system administrator determined that the local company would save X number of dollar by not hosting the data on their premises and paying for servers. They did a study and it all added up, so they moved to a multi-hosted, private intranet solution. “The Cloud”.

The transition was rough, many roadblocks were encountered, mainly bandwidth, as they had to increase their multiple T1s to a Charter Business Fiber connection to handle the traffic for the administration, design and production lines, and some software had to be rewritten.

After several months, things began to run more like they had in the past, with the exception of long delays while they downloaded larger files. And a number of times, they have lost internet connectivity, taking them down for minutes to hours at a time.

The administrative staff and the designers began to keep copies of the most important files on their local machines. They looked into getting a caching server onsite, but the cost was more than they were wanting to pay.

Now, today, they are completely offline, with no idea of when they will be back in production.

Of course, as an IT provider here in the Upstate, I have already made my pitch to help them relocate their data back to servers they control, with backup on remote servers, but their IT personnel still feel the current way is the best way, even though their “savings” was never realized, with no return on investment. We’ll see. I’ll keep at them.

If your business is considering a move to hosted services, make sure it is right for you.  There is a LOT that is often overlooked!

  • If you work with large CAD files that take a long time to open on your network now, remember, that you will move from a 100 or 1000 megabit connection, to a MUCH SLOWER connection if you move the files off site.
  • If you use Quickbooks or Peachtree, you might find that a connection less than 10meg up and down is simply not going to work for the size of your company file.
  • If you run a production line with 50 employees, that would be out of work without an internet connection, this is a bad idea for sure!

There are many factors that may make hosting elsewhere out of the question, but if you don’t know them, it may be too late when you find out.

Call us and schedule a consultation at 864-990-4748!

 

Our remote backup provider is expanding! #DisasterRecovery #Backup #Servosity

Our preferred remote backup solution provider is expanding in a big way!

Servosity, which is based right here in Greenville South Carolina, has made a commitment to create 30 new positions over the next 12 to 18 months. And these will be higher paying jobs with a much higher skill requirement.

We continue to use Servosity ourselves and provide their disaster recovery and backup services to our clients because they have one of the best offerings in the business. In addition to that, the money stays right here in the Upstate.

If you would like to find out more about how remote backup and disaster recovery solutions can protect your business data from catastrophic events, such as the recent hurricane that has pounded the East Coast this week, then please, give us a call at 864-990-4748 or use our contact form on the http://www.HomelandSecureIT.com website to arrange a free consultation.

We can protect one single desktop or laptop, or a Microsoft Exchange Server, or an entire network consisting of several servers and many computers with recovery of a lost system to new hardware possible within minutes!

Wish your business had the servers of a Fortune 500 company? You can! #hacked

For a price, you can have access to a Fortune 500 server and network according to an article on krebsonsecurity.com.

In the article, they explain hackers are creating a virtual services network of their own, using exploited / compromised / hacked systems sitting inside the corporate networks of Fortune 500 companies.

But it is not just the big corporations that are being compromised, it is businesses just like the one you work at or maybe own. The hackers are able to leverage holes in the operating systems of servers and weak passwords to gain full access, and then sell that access to others who might use your server to gain further access into your network, or simply setup a porn server, or a point where they can hack through your server to other servers elsewhere.

How do you protect yourself? Contact an IT professional who can assist you with an evaluation of your network.

Homeland Secure IT will work with you to help tighten up computer and network security as well as to help determine if your server has already been exploited. We can check your Microsoft Windows servers, RDP servers, firewalls and other common means of access for updates, apply them and determine the best way to keep your company network up to date without affecting your work flow.

Call us today at 864-990-4748 or use our CONTACT link on the website for more information.

SC Department of Revenue cyber attack exposes 3.6 million social security numbers

A data breech due to a cyber attack on a South Carolina Department of Revenue web server has exposed a potential 3.6 million SC social security numbers and approximately 387,000 debit card numbers, however, the official report indicates that only a small portion of the card numbers were not encrypted.

You can read about the attack timeline and response here and the WSPA news article here.

If the State’s server can be exploited, what about you?

Do you host data on your company server and feel it is totally safe?

For instance, you have a Microsoft Exchange Server, which resides behind a firewall, and it does not host anything but email, so you feel it is safe?

Not so fast – An Exchange Server might be behind a firewall, but is that firewall up to date? It might be so old that the latest firmware and software cannot even be applied to it. More importantly, if your Exchange Server does not have all the latest patches to it, it might be vulnerable to attack, even though a firewall is present.

A large number of servers at businesses go unpatched, and unprotected, yet are exposed to the internet. It might be an FTP server, a web server, SQL database server, or Remote Desktop server.  They all require updates, patches and evaluation, to assure their continued security.

Should you have a question about the status of your Greenville or Upstate network’s security, please call us at 864-990-4748 and arrange for a consultation. We specialize in small and medium business networks, servers and computers and would be happy to work with you to discover what can be done to protect your business.  We’re also partners with some of the most respected security industry leaders, such as Cisco, Symantec, Trend Micro, WatchGuard, SonicWALL, and more!

Relying on Jesus for computer and network security will not protect you

Relying on Jesus for computer security will not protect you

Relying on Jesus for computer and network security will not protect you

I bet that title got your attention!

But according to a list of passwords examined, “Jesus” will not protect you, as it is on SplashData’s list of password’s that are considered unsafe due to the sheer usage of them. Obviously, “password” is the worst, followed by “123456” and “12345678”.

I stole the following list of passwords from SplashData from the original article on cnet:

1. password (unchanged)
2. 123456 (unchanged)
3. 12345678 (unchanged)
4. abc123 (up 1)
5. qwerty (down 1)
6. monkey (unchanged)
7. letmein (up 1)
8. dragon (up 2)
9. 111111 (up 3)
10. bassball (up 1)
11. iloveyou (up 2)
12. trustno1 (down 3)
13. 1234567 (down 6)
14. sunshine (up 1)
15. master (down 1)
16. 123123 (up 4)
17. welcome (new)
18. shadow (up 1)
19. ashley (down 3)
20. football (up 5)
21. Jesus (new)
22. michael (up 2)
23. ninja (new)
24. mustang (new)
25. password1 (new)

If you are using any variation of these, we need to talk!  Honestly, if you are using simple passwords of this nature at all, then please call us at 864-990-4748 or use our contact form on the www.HomelandSecureIT.com website.

Business owners and those in IT departments of businesses in the Upstate / Greenville area of South Carolina can call us to schedule an evaluation of their computer and network security. We can help you secure your network, enforce user password strength and much more.  Please call us today and let’s take care of IT!

Buy Microsoft Office now, download the next versions FREE!

Microsoft Office 2010

The release of Microsoft Windows 8 is now just a few days away!

When you buy a desktop or notebook computer from us with Windows 8 on it, why not add Microsoft Office 2010?

Not only will you have the latest and greatest software and operating system, customers who purchase any qualifying version of Microsoft Office product between now and April 30, 2013 can download the next version of Office as soon as it is available!

Want more information about the new Windows 8 and the upcoming Microsoft Office release? Call us at 864-990-4748 or use our contact form on the website.

We are your Microsoft Small Business Specialist in Greenville / Upstate SC, offering sales and support of computers & servers from most manufacturers, powered by Microsoft!

Remotely monitor mountain or beach home with video surveillance

Home Security Camera System

Typical home security / surveillance camera

Some people are fortunate enough to own multiple properties, a home they live in, and then a home at the beach or in the mountains. However, one of the problems with owning these remote properties is that you can’t be there to keep up with what is going on.

You have no idea who is parking in your driveway, dumping trash on your property, casing the place for potential theft, or if the storm damaged anything.

Here’s an example; Though you have a house in the mountains, and you have an alarm on it in case someone breaks in, you only find out about it AFTER the intrusion occurs.

Using new technologies such as IP surveillance cameras, you can be notified the moment someone is on your property, BEFORE they gain entry to the home! This works by setting a camera pointed at a sensitive point on your property, such as a walkway, or your driveway, and configuring the system to send an email upon detection of motion.

Most of these systems can send a snapshot or video of what caused the motion.  As soon as you receive the notification, you can login remotely and view the camera/s in real time, even listening in to audio, and in some cases, talking back! You can view the cameras on your Apple Mac, Linux or Microsoft Windows computer using your favorite browser, or on your smartphone, android or iPad tablet. And recorded videos can cover weeks, even months!

Pricing has come down, and the quality has gone up!  Insurance rates may also be reduced if you have security systems and video surveillance in place for your vacation home.

If this sort of thing is of interest to you for your home, or your business, give Homeland Secure IT a call! We sell, install and upgrade CCTV, IP surveillance systems, network video recorders and digital video recorders. 864-990-4748 – We offer sales of all major brands of cameras and recorders!

Mass murder via computer malware in medical devices #MurderByMalware

mass murder via computer malware in medical devices

zzZZzzzZZZaaaap!

Imagine you have a pacemaker installed, and suddenly, the device discharges 830 volts into your body, certainly a fatal incident.

Now imagine that it is not accidental, but instead, a computer is used to make a wireless connection and cause this behavior to occur.  Murder by Malware if you will…  Or, due to a “feature” in the pacemaker itself, multiple devices are discharged within a 30ft radius of one another, effectively causing mass murder.

This sounds like science fiction, but it could actually happen, and it could happen today.  And pacemakers are not the only devices that may be vulnerable to this type of hack.

There is a pretty good article on this over on techcrunch.com and you should read it if you have a pacemaker or know someone else who does, just to increase your own awareness.

Combine that with the news that computer viruses are rampant on medical devices in hospitals, and it is not too far of a leap to say that healthcare can be deadly!

If your medical clinic or facility would like to discuss how Homeland Secure IT can help keep your computers, servers and networks safe, please call us at 864-990-4748 or use the contact form on our website. We provide computer & network security and support to Greenville, Spartanburg, Anderson and the rest of the Upstate of SC!