The Michigan IT Experts

Unfortunately, most attacks still come in through email, and can slip by your users. Even the most complex cybersecurity platforms used by massive corporations and governments can be foiled by a simple phishing attack, and your end-users are your last line of defense.

How Can an Employee Fall Victim?

Phishing attacks are designed to look real. An email might come in looking like a valid message from Paypal, a bank, a vendor, or even from another employee or client. Hackers use several tricks to make the email look real, such as spoofing the address or designing the content of the email to look legitimate.

Unfortunately, if the user clicks on the link in the email or downloads the attachment, they could open themselves and your company up to whatever threats contained within.

Commonly, this leads to stolen sensitive information, or installs malware on the device, or grants the hacker the ability to log into the user’s bank account.

While having strong IT security can reduce the amount of these phishing attacks that come in, a percentage can be tricky enough to bypass your firewalls and content filters, exposing your staff to situations that could your whole endeavor in

Educate Your Employees

It’s important to teach employees how to catch a phishing attack. We recommend sharing the following steps with your staff, or even printing them out and posting them around the office:

1. Carefully hover (don’t click!) over links and see if they go to a legitimate URL. If the email is from Paypal, a link should lead back to paypal.com or accounts.paypal.com. If there is anything strange between ‘paypal’ and the ‘.com’ then something is suspicious. There should also be a forward slash (/) after the .com.   If the URL was something like paypal.com.mailru382.co/something, then you are being spoofed. Everyone handles their domains a little differently, but use this as a general rule of thumb:
   1. paypal.com - Safe
   2. paypal.com/activatecard - Safe
   3. business.paypal.com - Safe
   4. business.paypal.com/retail - Safe
   5. paypal.com.activatecard.net - Suspicious! (notice the dot immediately after Paypal’s domain name)
   6. paypal.com.activatecard.net/secure - Suspicious!
   7. paypal.com/activatecard/tinyurl.com/retail - Suspicious! Don’t trust dots after the domain!
2. Check the email in the header. An email from Amazon wouldn’t come in as . Do a quick Google search for the email address to see if it is legitimate.
3. Always be careful opening attachments. If there is an attachment or link on the email, be extra cautious.
4. Be skeptical of password alerts. If the email mentions passwords, such as “your password has been stolen,” be suspicious.

Phishing Simulation

Another great tactic is to have regular phishing simulations. This is where we create a series of fake phishing emails (don’t worry, it’s safe), and randomly send it to your staff. When someone falls for the attack, we send them educational information to help them prevent being tricked by a real one.

We’ve found this to be very effective, without taking a lot of time out of an employees already busy day.

Are you interested in helping to protect your staff from falling victim to phishing attacks? Give us a call at 810-230-9455.

Properly Managing Your Email Like a Professional

Let’s not split hairs here: checking your email throughout the day can be a major waste of time. In order to avoid sinking time you could otherwise spend productively on reading (and re-reading) emails, there are a few habits you could develop.

Impose Rules on Your Email Habits

As we’ve said, repeatedly checking your email throughout the day can very quickly become a waste of your time. To avoid this, schedule times throughout your day to commit to checking your email. Once your time is up, stop until your next scheduled time.

We’ve all also accumulated emails that we simply don’t need to read. As harsh as it may seem, archive these emails, or unsubscribe as they come in to keep your inbox clean based on the subject line or the sender.

Managing Important Emails

Admittedly, not every email that comes in will be a waste of time. However, an overstuffed inbox can make it easy to miss something important. To avoid this issue, utilize folders to file your emails so that your inbox doesn’t become overfilled.

If Time is Left, Return to Your Inbox

If you finish your other tasks, return to your inbox and review your messages in order of importance. If you happen to run out of time, stop your review until your next opportunity. As you review your emails, don’t be afraid to unsubscribe to emails that aren’t important to your tasks.

Don’t Be Afraid to Leverage Filters and Labels

Filters and labels can help you to keep your emails more automatically organized. Your filters/labels should be relevant to their content. One can contain messages from a certain sender or pertain to a certain topic. As a result, you will be able to more easily keep your emails organized.

Rules like these can also keep you from having to deal with automatic replies, like out-of-office autoresponders and similar replies that you don’t need to receive.

What other emails have gotten in the way of your productivity? Let us know… we might cover them in a future blog! For more information, subscribe to our blog!

What Does Your IT Infrastructure Look Like?

Your IT infrastructure consists of all the technology that enables your organization to store and utilize data that it has collected. This includes your network, your storage system, and any hardware and software solutions that are used to access it. Basically, an IT infrastructure is effectively your organization’s central nervous system, supporting operations through the transportation of data.

It’s clear that your IT infrastructure will play an important role in the way your business works. This means that you’ll need to invest time and energy into developing a proper strategy for your IT infrastructure to adhere to.

Determining Your IT Infrastructure Strategy

The same infrastructure won’t work for all businesses, so you’ll have to craft one. To create an optimized infrastructure strategy, consider the following best practices.

Simplification

Make no mistake--your infrastructure today hardly resembles what it looked like just a few short years ago (at least, it shouldn’t). Chances are that your IT infrastructure contains several different types of technology. This complicates the process of improving and updating it.

Be sure to consider the modern standardization of the software and integrations that are possible with your centralized IT platform, as this will maximize access to data and increase how much value you get from your solutions.

Flexibility

IT is always changing and adapting to trends, which means that you will want to build your IT infrastructure in such a way that it can take advantage of these changes. Ask yourself where your organization’s biggest speed constraints are, as well as how they can be rectified. If you can consolidate your existing infrastructure to limit the risks, how would this affect your business processes? These are all factors that must be taken into consideration.

Service-Focused

The biggest advantage that IT provides for your organization is that operations can’t happen without it. When planning out your infrastructure, be sure to consider the fact that your entire business will need to use it for access to services and tools required for each employee’s day-to-day responsibilities. Ask yourself what you can do to make sure your infrastructure can do what must be done both now and in the future.

Why You Should Consider a Managed IT Infrastructure

You might recall the process you used to create your network back when your business was just a fledgling pushing back against the world. Remember that feeling and use it to fuel the process of reexamining your current IT infrastructure. In fact, you may find it more reasonable to outsource this task to a managed service provider.

There are many benefits to doing this, but the biggest has to come from the time you’ll save from doing so. You have a lot on your plate as a business owner. Can you say with confidence that you have the time it takes to design, build, manage, and maintain an IT infrastructure? Of course not--there simply aren’t enough hours in the day. Instead, you hand this responsibility to professionals you trust to ensure that the process goes well.

NuTech Services wants to be the MSP you trust to make sure your infrastructure is working for your business and its goals. To learn more about the services we offer, reach out to us at 810-230-9455.