News

1. Snap between apps

The man who wrote the book on password management has a confession to make: He blew it.

With the increasing use of phishing emails, we’d like to draw your attention to how to identify whether the email links you are being asked to click are legitimate. This is done by hovering your cursor / pointer over the link and revealing the domain or destination to where you will be sent. If you look at the final part of the domain before the forward slash (/) you can determine whether you think this link is from the organization referred to in the email. In the example below .cenotehopping makes little sense and indicates the link is not authentic. 

If there is a string of cryptic numbers or an .exe file do not click on the link. Ring the organisation who has sent you the email and verify that the email is legitimate.  As always it is better to be cautious than caught out.

Microsoft offers this information on recognising phishing email messages, links, or phone calls.

For a considerable period, small external USB hard drives were a favoured means of backing up a company’s valuable data. This backup method ticked the boxes by ensuring the storage device was backed up to another destination and secondly that backup was taken offsite. It was a satisfactory solution provided there was at least 3 drives, they were rotated out daily and one of the set was always offsite in a secure location.

Unfortunately, over time the short comings of this type of backup have become painfully apparent.

The list of problems include:
• USB Drives failing due to constant handling and transporting
• Drive not changed due to designated person being on leave or off sick
• Staff become forgetful or complacent and drive changes do not occur daily
• Error reports generated by the backup software being ignored

One of the inherent problems with this backup system is that if the current backup and the source are at the same location and a disaster occurred later in the day the amount of work lost can be up to 2 days. In this scenario, the last backup is going to be at least 24 hours old and still onsite with the person who was responsible for taking it home that evening.

We know of a company where one of the backup drives had failed and they were down to only two in rotation. On the day of the February earthquake, the server was in the office, the first backup drive was plugged into the server ready for the end of day back up, and the second drive was in the manager’s briefcase ready to be taken off site that evening. When the quake struck everyone quickly evacuated the building leaving the server and all the backups in the building.  Fortunately, the company was able to get back into the building and rescue the backup. In doing so they avoided a disastrous data loss and learnt a very powerful lesson.

It is for all of the above reasons that Computer Culture no longer recommends this type of backup. With the value of company data and rapid growth of cybercrime, a robust backup system is now an essential part of an organisations IT. 

An offsite backup solution which is proactively managed and monitored has become the favoured solution of many of our customers. Please call us If you wish to make the move away from the rotated drive backup system.

By now, you’ve heard about phishing – fraudulent emails that masquerade as communications from a legitimate source. These emails trick unsuspecting readers into giving up personal information or compromise their machines with spyware or viruses. Thankfully, email filtering and security has improved a great deal over the past few years. Unfortunately, no matter how effective the security, some phishing emails will always make it to the inbox – that’s where you come in. Here are some tips to help you identify a phishing or spoofing email.

Every year on January 28th, the world celebrates Data Privacy Day. But keeping data safe and out of the wrong hands isn’t a once-a-year task. Today, keeping your data private is a daily task—one that involves an understanding of new data protection regulations and cyber security best practices. Here are nine predictions to help you understand what data privacy and security will look like in 2017.

1. Privacy and security will clash. There will be a major clash between privacy and security, as advances are made on both fronts from various legislative actions. On the one hand, countries are working to expand their surveillance of data communications and streamline law enforcement access to computers and data. For example, Britain’s new Investigatory Powers Act (Snooper’s Charter) will require ISPs to keep logs of all websites visited by UK citizens for 12 months and which websites were visited but not the pages and not the full browsing history. It also allows police authorities and intelligence officers to see users’ Internet records as part of their targeted and filtered investigations without a warrant.
   On the other hand, data protection laws, such as the EU GDPR, which will go into effect on May 25, 2018, will restrict how businesses collect, store and use personal data and institute enforcement mechanisms to ensure businesses are reporting on data breaches in a timely manner to governing bodies. For example, businesses will be required to notify supervisory authorities of a data breach within 72 hours.
   
   
2. Second-hand electronics will cause headaches for many businesses. The rise in second-hand electronics will become a data recovery nightmare for both businesses and end users. An independent analysis of used drives and mobile devices from online sites like Amazon, eBay, Gazelle and Craigslist have shown this to be true with large amounts of sensitive personal data and corporate data recovered, including customer lists, Salesforce records, spreadsheets with sales information, company emails, social security numbers, financial details, photos, videos and so much more. This calls into question certain ‘reliable’ methods many businesses and people are using to supposedly ‘delete’ data. But many of these methods (i.e. quick format, basic delete, factory reset) are not actually effective and leave a treasure trove of data exposed to hackers.
   
   
3. Companies will leave data behind. Companies that go out of business – or shut down part of their operations/physical locations – need to add secure data removal into their ‘close down’ procedures. If they don’t, hackers could easily discover sensitive, confidential corporate data that’s been left behind in online backups, orphaned data stores, servers and virtual machines.
   
   
4. The Internet of Things will expand. IoT will create a morass of personal and corporate data on millions of connected devices. The only way to ensure all that connected data doesn’t fall into the wrong hands is to create a system of processes and tools that make it easy to manage, protect and securely erase all data on-demand. The important piece here will be in providing proof that the connected data has been removed and cannot resurface at any given point in the future.
   
   
5. Hackers will turn recent proof of concept exploits into attacks. This will allow them to mine poorly wiped virtual machines. Essentially, they’ll be able to steal credentials and other critical data. Organizations need to ensure they know where their data resides, especially when it comes to the cloud. Processes must be put in place to ensure that virtual machines are permanently and verifiably erased when they are no longer needed.
   
   
6. Ransomware, spear phishing and direct attacks will be a triple threat. The triple scourge of ransomware, spear phishing against corporate treasury functions and direct attacks on central banks will continue to drive investments in new security technology. On the endpoint, new technologies that use machine learning are being deployed to catch malware without needing signatures. Learning and training systems are being deployed to reduce the number of successful spear phishing attacks. Central banks are, in turn, beefing up their own cybersecurity practices and requiring partners to do so too.
   
   
7. Quantum computing research will continue. Nations will continue to make large investments in quantum computing research with the goal of being the first to engineer a major breakthrough. The winner in this new arms race will have a short-term edge (and leverage) in the world of technology. On the one hand, this will create a crisis for all cryptography since quantum computing is theorized to be extremely effective at breaking even the largest key. On the other hand, it will create an opportunity for post-quantum crypto start-ups. New methods of encryption will be proposed that are impervious to cracking with quantum computers.
   
   
8. Denial of Service attacks will be broken. In 2017, all records for large distributed Denial of Service attacks will be broken. Every organisation that depends on connectivity for communicating with their customers or providing a service should have a plan in place for dealing with DDos attacks. This means redundant systems for computing, DNS and connectivity, and a recovery plan. Look for single points of failure because the attackers will find them.
   
   
9. Where data is stored will matter more. The geographical preferences for where data is hosted will increase. For example, companies may want to host data in the UK or elsewhere. This will then require businesses to migrate data, which in turn, will trigger the need to permanently erase data from old locations. And this will need to be done on a large-scale basis for big companies – and will require specific processes to ensure the data migration project was done properly and that ‘old’ data was properly removed.

Of the many methods, scammers seem to use the bank scam email approach on a frequent basis.

Always treat any communication from the bank with skepticism and keep in mind:

Your bank 
will NEVER ask you for your Internet banking password or your card PIN.
will NEVER ask you to download any software onto your computer
will NEVER ask you to grant the bank remote access to your computer

If you are not sure, ask for the caller’s details and call you bank to verify the caller

Never give out your personal or financial details
Don’t click on links in emails even if they seem legitimate
Always ensure there is a security symbol in your browser.

See some further information on this on ANZ's website here.

Many of us have become very dependent on our mobile phones and unfortunately along the way, a lot of us have developed some bad habits.
How often do you see someone crossing the road while texting or talking on their phones?
Walk through a busy mall and you are constantly dodging the same people, their heads down and not watching where they are going. If you sit down for a coffee, it almost seems as though every second person has their smart phone out. I always wonder if couples are texting each other across the table, rather than having to engage in conversation.
Attend a function and invariably several phones will start ringing in the middle of a presentation.

We all have our favourite phone apps and we have been featuring a number in our past newsletters. Some users just use their smart phones for making calls, texts, taking photos and the occasional visit to Facebook.
Here is a list of some of the apps that our staff use to get more out of their smart phones.



• AA Smartfuel 
• Air NZ
• Bank App
• CellarTracker
• Dropbox
• Evernote
• Entertainment 
• Facebook
• Fly Buys
• Google Drive
• Here WeGo
• iTunes
• Kerbside Collection
• LinkedIn
• MetService
• Netflix
• Office Lens
• OneDrive
• OneNote
• Shazam
• Skype
• Sky TV
• SkyGo
• Snap Send Solve
• Spotify
• SoundHound
• Stocard
• Stuff
• Trade Me
• TradeMe Property
• Twitter
• YouTube
• Viber
• Uber
• Wunderlist