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Smart Services has been providing independent agents with proactive, fast, and expert technology services since 1991.

The Importance of Secure Conferencing

The Importance of Secure Conferencing

Conferencing has been an important tool for businesses as stay-at-home orders have moved their operations out of the office and into worker’s homes. While there are dozens of video conferencing solutions on the market, businesses should consider security just as much as they consider functionality. Today, we’ll take a look at security for your company’s conferencing solutions.

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Protecting Your Data Privacy Is Harder than Ever

Protecting Your Data Privacy Is Harder than Ever

If you consider it, it’s amazing how much trust people have in Internet-based companies. They not only believe that these companies will fulfill their expectations, but that they will work to provide protection for some of their most valuable and sensitive information. Let’s take a look at some of the data collection practices that companies use and what they do with that data. 

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Cybersecurity Takes Effort at 3 Levels

Cybersecurity Takes Effort at 3 Levels

The way people talk about cybersecurity, it’s as if it is something like a television or a new phone: something you can just buy. That’s not the truth. When you are seriously looking at how you can keep unwanted entities off your network, while having control over what you do with your technology, you need to look at it as three levels of security.

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What We Can Learn from the 2020 Data Breach Investigations Report

What We Can Learn from the 2020 Data Breach Investigations Report

Starting in 2008, Verizon has produced a report outlining the cybersecurity incident trends that the previous year demonstrated. In doing so, they have provided a resource that gives businesses greater insights into where their cybersecurity efforts need to be focused. Let’s go over some of 2019’s trends and insights that were highlighted in the Verizon Business 2020 Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR).

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Why You Need to Audit Your Security

Why You Need to Audit Your Security

A security audit is designed to test the overall integrity of your business when it comes to its IT security. In today’s environment, businesses need to have strengthened fortifications in place to protect themselves from cyberthreats, and these fortifications need to be properly tested and reviewed over time. Let’s talk about some of the types of audits and their benefits, and how you can assess your security.

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Let’s Help You Understand PCI Compliance

Let’s Help You Understand PCI Compliance

Nowadays, every business accepts payment cards. To protect people’s personal and financial information when conducting transactions using credit, debit, and gift cards, the companies that stand to lose the most if these transactions are compromised: Visa, Mastercard, Discover, and American Express, have implemented industry-wide compliance regulations. This regulation is called PCI DSS, short for Payment Card Index Digital Security Standard. Let’s take a brief look at this regulation.

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What We Can Learn from Some Foreboding Security Predictions

What We Can Learn from Some Foreboding Security Predictions

With the COVID-19 crisis far from over, many businesses have had their attention pulled away from their cybersecurity needs by the concerns that the current health crisis has generated. Here, we’ll be reviewing some of the observations that a group of 273 cybersecurity professionals have made, courtesy of an annual survey.

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Employment Scams Have Recently Exploded

Employment Scams Have Recently Exploded

With COVID-19 creating an unsure situation for so many businesses, and by extension their employees, these employees are suddenly finding themselves in a vulnerable position. Regardless of whether or not your employees are able to come into the office right now, it is important that you share the following information with them, as it may help to keep them out of a tough spot.

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Best Practices for Your Access Management

Best Practices for Your Access Management

As you oversee your business, there is a lot that you’re going to have to manage - including how much access your employees have to the data you have collected and generated throughout your operations. An access management policy can help you to accomplish this. Here, we’ll review a few key features you need to include in your strategy.

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Tip of the Week: 3 Considerations When Securing Personal Information

Tip of the Week: 3 Considerations When Securing Personal Information

Personal information is precious, especially in this increasingly digital day and age. This makes it incredibly important that you are doing everything you can to protect it in your business - whether it is your own or belongs to somebody else. Here, we’ll go over a few tips to help you better protect the data you’re responsible for.

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Do Inherent Security Risks Make Smart Devices Dumb?

Do Inherent Security Risks Make Smart Devices Dumb?

Over the past few years, there has been a general fascination with smart devices in the home, and to a certain extent, the office. These Internet of Things-powered appliances and gadgets can help add to the convenience of rote tasks and other everyday activities, but is it actually a good idea to use them? As it turns out, unless you’ve taken the proper precautions, maybe not.

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Coronavirus: A Threat to Your Staff, Cyberthreat to Your Operations

Coronavirus: A Threat to Your Staff, Cyberthreat to Your Operations

COVID-19, or coronavirus, has been a major global health concern over the past couple of months. At this point, it is clear that this disease could have serious impacts on the workplace. We wanted to provide a brief rundown of good workplace and network health practices, as well as a few pointers on how you can handle health-based employee absences.

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Let’s Look at the Different Types of Ransomware

Let’s Look at the Different Types of Ransomware

The growing popularity of ransomware has been disconcerting to many IT professionals, particularly due to the different tactics that this malware variant has been spotted utilizing. In order to protect your business from these attacks, it helps to know how they work. We’ve put together a beginner’s field guide to ransomware types to help you identify (and hopefully avoid) it.

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What You Need to Consider to Securely Permit Remote Work

What You Need to Consider to Securely Permit Remote Work

At any given time, a business needs to consider its security, but this need only exacerbates when its employees are working remotely. With the coronavirus pandemic still in play, the likelihood is that your employees are in this situation has risen dramatically. In order to maintain  your organizational security, you need to consider the many factors that a remote workforce can introduce.

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Do You Know How to Build Solid Passwords?

Do You Know How to Build Solid Passwords?

The password is the core element of both data security and user authentication. This makes the construction of them extremely important to protecting digital assets. Unfortunately, not everyone understands how to construct passwords that actually work to protect the information on the other side. Today, we will discuss how to build a solid password that works to keep your digital resources safe.

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How Cybercriminals Are Keeping Themselves Entertained

How Cybercriminals Are Keeping Themselves Entertained

With the given pandemic, a lot of people have had a bit more time on their hands, so it makes sense that many are turning to streaming services and the like for their entertainment. Unfortunately, this has not gone unnoticed by cybercriminals.

Let’s take a few moments and examine the practice of credential stuffing.

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Ransomware is Still a Major Threat

Ransomware is Still a Major Threat

Ransomware is the scariest type of malware out there. It can have a myriad of negative effects on a business, yet it seems to still be on the fringe of the mainstream. Today, we thought we would give somewhat of a refresher course on ransomware. 

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Comparing the Relative Danger of AI-Aided Crimes

Comparing the Relative Danger of AI-Aided Crimes

When we think of cybercrime, most people’s minds go to one of two places. On the one hand, some think about the annoying, misspelled emails that are so obviously scams, while on the other, we can’t help but think about the hacks that we see in movies, where a criminal manages to overcome the best the government can incorporate into their defenses.

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Are VPNs Really Secure?

Are VPNs Really Secure?

We’ve not been shy about promoting the use of VPNs (virtual private networks) as a means of protecting your security while you are online. However, we wanted to take a bit of time to specify what a VPN can - and cannot - do to help you.

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New Cyberattack Targeting Remote Workers

New Cyberattack Targeting Remote Workers

Since the onset of the coronavirus, many businesses have managed to sustain themselves through remote work—also commonly known as telework. While this strategy has allowed quite a few businesses to survive, it has also opened them up to security threats. Here, let’s focus on one such threat: vishing, or voice phishing.

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