AZCOMP Technologies IT July 2019

855-556-4677 www.azcompit.com

JULY 2019

Empowering Small Practices to Deliver the Best Care

IT

If you live in an area that experiences heavy rains or hurricanes, you get flood insurance. It’s just that simple. When a threat to our safety and security is more than a one-in-a-million shot, it’s smart to play defense against that threat. And yet, despite the self-evidence of this idea, too many business owners don’t do enough to defend against cybercrime, a threat every company faces in 2019. You need to ask yourself if your business is living in an uninsured home, as it were, before it’s too late. According to Roger A. Grimes, 11-year principal security architect for Microsoft and cybersecurity columnist and speaker, “Eventually, every company is hacked.” It’s easy to convince yourself that your company is immune to a breach. Maybe you tell yourself you’re too small to draw the attention of cybercriminals, but that preconception is mistaken. Hackers target any business they think they can victimize. Small businesses lacking the security resources of major corporations make easy targets for a quick buck. There is no size or industry that precludes a business from being attacked. If you’re open for business, you’re a target. As scary as it sounds, you have to approach IT security as though you will face a hacker at some point down the road. The stakes really are that high. By taking an ignorance-is-bliss approach, you’re leaving the livelihoods of your business and your team members vulnerable to the whims of nefarious criminals the world over. So, there’s no question as to whether or not you need security measures; it’s a matter of which measures. “The two most likely reasons you will get exploited are due to unpatched software or a social engineering event where someone is tricked into installing something they shouldn’t,” Grimes notes. “It would be a stretch to claim every other exploit type in the world, added together, would account for 1% of the risk.” PROTECT YOURSELF AND TRAIN YOUR TEAM How to Combat Security Threats Before They Cripple Your Business

Patching your software is easy and keeps your defenses up to date. Updates contain security measures that protect you against the latest tactics used by hackers. Without them, you make yourself an alluring prospect for a breach attempt. You can set your software to update automatically or carve out a specific time each week to install all available updates. However you go about it, you must update regularly. Training your staff to not fall prey to social engineering requires educating them on the ways they can be duped. Nobody on your team should be unaware of phishing emails or any other disguised attempt to get them to click on a malicious link. Training should be an ongoing concern because breach methods evolve all the time. You need to work on creating ironclad policies for safe internet behavior. Once those policies are in place, you need to ensure every employee sticks to them. A great way to train your team is to set up a test with a dummy phishing attempt. If anyone falls for it, it’s time for some reeducation. Finally, you have to work with a company that’s invested in protecting your network 24/7. Those cheap companies that only show up when something’s wrong don’t make any money keeping your business immune to threats. They don’t know the ins and outs of your network and can’t act quickly in the event the worst does happen. You deserve to work with a partner who will do everything they can to prevent attacks in the first place. Though we haven’t yet figured out a way to stop floods from occurring, we do know how to deter hackers from bringing your business to its knees. The question is, are you doing enough? –Byron Adams

855-556-4677 AZCOMP Technologies www.azcompit.com • 1

Published by The Newsletter Pro • www.TheNewsletterPro.com

STAYING SIGNED IN Most hackers aren’t going to be able to force their way into your account by trying a nearly infinite combination of passwords. But if you fail to log out of your accounts, they won’t have to. When using public machines, it’s essential that your final step is signing out of every account you’ve logged into. You can adjust the settings within different services to automatically sign you out when you close a window. You can also create alerts to be sent to you whenever a new device uses an account of yours. These are great ways to monitor if anyone has been sneaking into your Facebook or Amazon accounts. FAILURE TO UPDATE Yes, updates can feel like a constant and arbitrary nuisance, but they’re as much about new features you don’t see as they are about the ones you do. Updates come with fresh security patches that protect you from hackers’ latest tactics. Without the latest version of a program, you are basically wearing a digital sign that says, “hack me.” NEVER BACKING UP FILES It is so easy to create either cloud-based or terrestrial backups of your most important files. You may never need them, but, in the event you do, you’ll be thanking your lucky stars you put forth the minimal effort to create them. 4 KILLER SECURITY MISTAKES You May Not Know You’re Making NEED NETWORKING OR COMPUTER HELP?

Many security breaches are not the result of technology failing. Instead, they are caused by something that has been around for a lot longer than social media, the internet, or computers: human error. Even if you do your best to train your teams about avoiding dangerous behavior on a work network, you may not be so scrupulous when it comes to your personal accounts. Here are a few common security mistakes almost everyone has made at some point or another. AN UNPROTECTED WEBCAM When Facebook celebrated 500 million users in 2016, Mark Zuckerberg posted a picture of himself at his desk to celebrate. Many keen observers noticed that Zuckerberg favors a strategically placed piece of a Post-it note to cover his laptop’s webcam. You can opt for this decidedly low-tech approach as well or download an app like OverSight or Who Stalks My Cam. A hacked camera can be used to watch you 24/7, so playing defense in some form is a very good idea.

SPOTLIGHT ON EMMANUEL GARZON

Emmanuel Garzon is the newest member of the AZCOMP team.

He started a little over three months ago and is quickly becoming an ace in our technical support department. With over a decade of experience doing EMR support for Kaiser, Emmanuel has the skills to work anywhere. “What drew me to AZCOMP,” he says, “is the culture of the company. I read the job description, and I knew I wanted to work here.”

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