Mar 22 2017 12:00AM
Category: Articles

The Best Antivirus

I work quite a bit with a company that has grown a great deal in the last few years. That growth has increased their public profile and made them a target for hackers.

Whereas their network is secured through firewalls, segmentation, antivirus, and stringent email filters (rejecting most attachments), they are still plagued with regular infections. The current strategy for prevention is a technical one and effectively shores up vulnerabilities as they happen. A recent virus came in the form of an attached html file and after cleaning up and isolating the infection, they changed their email security to block html files. 

From a purely technical standpoint, their IT team is doing almost everything they can. 

For as long as there has been hackers, there has been a human element to hacking. Whereas early hackers would use social engineering to learn about users and find ways to hack into their account, todays hackers rely on human behavior to deliver their payload. While antivirus programs can stop a majority of viruses, they can't stop people from, well, themselves.

The aforementioned company has been suffering mainly from ransomware and virus attacks that target its people. The hackers have figured out corporate org charts and key personnel so an email directed at the accounting group seemingly originating from the department director carries far more weight than some unknown random individual. Seeing an email from their boss, he/she opens up the attachment and the hacker owns them.

We developed the first set of training and now their IT is very engaged in educating their team members as ultimately your people are your best antivirus. If you have ingrained in each and every individual an "am I expecting this?" and "confirm with sender verbally first then open" mentality, the incidences will reduce if not disappear altogether.

If you would like more information on how to work with your own team in reducing virus and hacker risk, please contact us.

Aug 17 2016 9:24AM
Category: Articles

But, it's just a text file

In the last few years, I've attended a number of users conferences for different enterprise software programs. You can find out a lot about the applications and more importantly, the company behind it, by what types of sessions they offer. The ones that are more marketing and sales-oriented are likely to be all about increasing revenue whereas the ones focused on users and their challenges are clearly all about support.

While I saw both sides of that spectrum, in all cases I sought out the technology round tables. These round tables afford users the opportunity to discuss problems and wishlists with the individuals responsible for implementing product revisions. More importantly you can find out what challenges other customers are experiencing and how they are working through them.

What I found most interesting about all of these sessions were the variety of issues that would be pretty simple to rectify but remained on everyone's wish list.

In many of these cases, people would ask about a text file they needed to export to an accounting system or one they would need to import for reporting purposes. They could see the data within the application and instinctively knew it should be easy to get at, but year after year it remained a want. A lot of software companies are focused on the big items and keep shuffling off the little stuff to a later date. 

To be fair, many of these things apply just to a subset of customers and applying resources to such a small segment isn't practical. However, if a customer can save time or benefit to any degree as a result of this additional functionality there is value. 

We've done enough integrations between disparate systems that we can help in a number of areas. Either we can develop the process ourselves on your system or develop a spec and identify the process for implementing. Sometimes clarifying needs and resources is enough to start a conversation on the right foot. If we do the work, we can often do so in a few days.

If you would like more information on how we can help with the automation of processes, please contact us.