The Internet has always had its share of bad apples, and those bad apples are making big headlines lately.  With the DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks on Twitter and Facebook in the past few days it has really shown who has the upper hand when dealing with IT security.  What alarms us the most is the increasing number of vulnerabilities in Windows based operating systems when those said systems are not maintained.  By maintaining we mean ensuring that the system is updated regularly with the latest patches for ALL software on the system, the BIOS firmware, Antivirus definitions, Anti-Spyware definitions and most importantly the updates for your particular operating system.  The days of avoiding operating system updates have come and gone.  The industry has realized that releasing updates that have not been strenuously tested for real-world applications results in bad publicity, lower customer confidence and worst of all for them, a potential crash of their stock price.  

What can you do?

You can run Windows Update regularly, update your antivirus definitions, your spyware definitions and any other software updates.  We do not recommend doing your own security scans because you will not know if your system is already compromised or not.  Let us do that for you because we have seen an increasing amount of malware that fakes you out and makes you think that your system is operating normally.  Your antivirus is actually tricked into thinking that you are protected, and the whole time you may be assisting spammers send thousands of emails out to other innocent users.  This happens with systems that are not updated regularly.

Backups

You are backing up your system, aren't you?  If you are not backing up your most important files then you will be at a tremendous loss if and when your hard drive fails, your system is compromised or if you have the unfortunate luck of your building burning down.  We recommend an offsite backup solution, meaning, take your backup media home and rotate it regularly.   

How about your emails?  Are you backing up your PST file as well?  If you don't know what that means then imagine what it would be like to use years and years worth of emails, never to be recovered again!  We handle that too!

Regrets Are Not Worth It!

If all of this seems overwhelming then you need to call us so we can figure out the best way to protect yourself.   We have seen an increased number of attacks on all levels of computing just in the past 2 weeks!!  Don't be a victim and don't end up wasting money trying to restore things the hard way.