Sklar Technology PartnersSklar Technology Partners

October is National Cyber Security Awareness Month!

SklarTech — Wed, 05 Oct 2011 13:35:36 +0000

Sklar is doing their part to help!

For the eighth year in a row, October has been declared National Cyber Security Awareness Month, the objective is to help educate the public on how to protect themselves online. Lexington, Ky.-based National Association of State Chief Information Officers (NASCIO) to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) will provide extra resources during the month to spread online safety.

In light of us taking part in helping business owners take proactive actions to secure their sensitive corporate and personal data we are hosting our second data security seminar this year (eighth over the past four years). The purpose is to educate business leaders on who is behind these cyber crimes, what their motivations are and how businesses can take action to reduce their risks. The seminar will be held in Innsbrook tomorrow, October 6th, at The Place. As a bonus, all of the attendees are given the opportunity to have our team of security specialists perform a complementary security assessment.

In additional to the seminar below are a few tips on how you can stay safe.

How can you stay safe?

– Keep your operating system updated/patched.
– Use anti-virus and anti-spyware software and keep them updated.
– Do not visit un-trusted websites or follow links provided by unknown or un-trusted sources.
– Secure your transactions. Look for the “lock” icon on the browser’s status bar and be sure “HTTPS” appears in the website’s address bar before making an online purchase. The “s” stands for “secure” and indicates that the communication with the Web page is encrypted.
– Be cautious about all communications you receive including those purported to be from “trusted entities” and be careful when clicking links contained within those messages.
– Do not respond to any unsolicited/spam incoming e-mails.
– Do not open any attachments contained in suspicious e-mails.
– Do not respond to an e-mail requesting personal information or that ask you to “verify your information” or to “confirm your user-id and password.”
– Beware of e-mails that threaten any dire consequences should you not “verify your information.”
– Do not enter personal information in a pop-up screen. Providing such information may compromise your identity and increase the odds of identity theft.
– Have separate passwords for work related and non-work related accounts.

“How can you stay safe” Source: VITA

The Duhs of Security

Is cash dissappearing from your bank account?

SklarTech — Wed, 27 Jul 2011 09:30:55 +0000

This story is from Sans News-bytes today… this is the second small business that has had this happen to them in the past week. My recommendation is to talk to your bank about securing transactions with passwords, call backs or some type of two form authentication. Simple measures can save your business from a disaster or failure.

–Escrow Company Suing Bank Over Fraudulent Transactions
(July 19 & 25, 2011)
A California escrow company is suing its former bank, alleging that Professional Business Bank was negligent and did not fulfill the terms of its online banking contract. Village View Escrow lost more than US
$465,000 to fraudulent wire transfers in March 2010. Village View had a contract with Professional Business Bank that stated that electronic transfers must be authorized by two company employees and a phone call
from certain company telephone numbers before they were permitted to proceed. Professional Business Bank apparently outsourced some of its
online banking functions to a company that required little more than a username and password. The cyber thieves conducted 26 wire transfers to
20 accounts around the world with which the escrow company had no legitimate business.

Supporting links:
http://krebsonsecurity.com/2011/07/calif-co-sues-bank-over-465k-ebanking-heist/
http://www.darkreading.com/smb-security/167901073/security/attacks-breaches/231002153/yet-another-bank-sued-by-a-small-business-for-fraudulent-hacker-transfers.html
http://docs.ismgcorp.com/files/external/1st-Amend-Complaint.pdf

Get your head out of the sand!

SklarTech — Tue, 26 Jul 2011 16:48:39 +0000

What activities are you doing right now to get other businesses interested in your services? What will make them think of you next time they need something you offer versus your competition. If you are still paying for a yellow page add you can pretty much bet that is a waste of cash, I can’t remember where my book even is much less think to even use it when I’m looking for a service! A few years ago I started studying marketing and fell in love with it. Yes, I love marketing! It is creative and fun! If you think we are still weathering a bad economy and waiting for things to get better you should think again. What if this is the new economy and things aren’t going to get better, you will need to change and get your head out of the sand!

Here are a few fun ideas to try that have worked for us.

1. Take a look at your web page. Does it look like a 3rd grader created it? Are there any forms for people to fill out that require their name, email and or phone number? Is there content on the page that would make someone leave their contact information? Maybe a blog to subscribe for? If you are going to collect leads for your sales efforts don’t you need a way to get that information? If you don’t have “conversion forms” to collect data you won’t collect anything!

2. Do some research on what your current clients do today to find services. What key words are they typing in Google? You are probably over-thinking it because you are what I call poisoned with the knowledge. You know too much! For instance I might think someone would search for business continuity services or data security to find us but the reality is someone is more likely to search Server Repair or IT Support in Richmond Va long before they even understand what business continuity services are. After you find the top 10 key words or so type them into Google. Do you find yourself? If not you probably need to fix that!

3. Profile your top 5-10 clients. Are there similarities, things in common with them. Maybe vertically they are the same? Is the size of the company similar, geography, credit rating or maybe revenue? Figure it out then find more of them and do a special campaign just for them. We call this our dream prospects campaign, a concept I learned from Chet Holmes the author of The Ultimate Sales Machine.

4. Hire or contract someone who has the time and the knowledge to get your business in the right media streams. The old ways of marketing aren’t really viable anymore and if your phone isn’t ringing then your inbound marketing investments are failing. FIRE THEM!

I hired Sam about a year ago and she has been dynamite! I had all of these ideas but not a lot of time to implement them. My sales team needs and deserves quality leads and if they aren’t successful then we aren’t going to be.

Now Sam not only implements the ideas but she is now teaching me how to improve our efforts! Give her a call sometime… 804-730-2628

Going green pays off for Sklar Technology Partners!

SklarTech — Tue, 19 Jul 2011 15:22:10 +0000

Over the past 12 months our firm, Sklar Technology Partners, has made several investments to improve our operational efficiencies and our carbon foot print. The bonus isthat we also lowered our monthly utility bills and more impressively a large portion of our investments were reimbursed through grants.

The first was acquiring the Teleworkva.org grant through the GRCC Ride-finders program. The teleworking grant allowed us to make technology investments to enable our employees to work remotely several days per month. One of our employees, Chad Andrus, who was relocated to Norfolk works remotely 4 out of 5 days every week. He is our most efficient employee and closes more service tickets per week than all of the other techs. For me, teleworking works! Despite most of your objections your employees will work just has hard if not harder without management watching over them. For Chad, he loves it and his job!

The second was investing in our lighting. We contracted with the Balducci Home Builders Smartwire 360 team. We replaced all of our overhead lighting with new GE green lighting and cut our bulb count in half. The interesting result was that the lighting is actually brighter and not only have we cut our bulbs in half the wattage was also cut by 40%. Then we received a $900 credit from Dominion Va Power for making this change. We calculated our annual investment in bulbs alone and found we spent almost $400 just in the past year so the 3 year warranty on the bulbs is even more found cash! This is a no brainier! One of my clients, Bennett Mineral Company in Walkerton, has seen a significant ROI on the SmartWire 360 investment and estimates a savings of up to $60,000 per year in his electric bill.

The third was the window tinting. Teresa Lewis, our dispatcher, did some research and found that we could cut about 40% of the heat coming through our front windows by having them tinted. Not only has this helped reduce the heat but the sun would reflect off the cars in the afternoon and literally blind us! There apparently is a grant for this investment but we are currently waiting for the reimbursement.

Last we replaced all of our ceiling tiles with insulated and vinyl tiles. Our roof has leaked for years. As a result the tiles are constantly having to be replaced and there are always water spots. In addition our insulation has been moved all around and isn’t spread evenly. We replaced the tiles with R2 insulated tiles and because they are vinyl they don’t allow water to pass through.

If you have made investments like these please let us know about it so we can spread the good word!

Want to make a few extra bucks? Cyber crime is profitable and easy!

SklarTech — Tue, 12 Jul 2011 21:40:57 +0000

The new face of cyber crime: Pay per install

How Cyber Criminals make money today

Cyber criminal organizations are now outsourcing their dirty work. If you need to earn a few extra bucks you could visit sites like Pay-per-install.org or installscash.org (these sites have been taken down) and become part of a cyber crime crew. Below is a video talking about the owner of blackhatworld.com and warns not to visit the site because it will infect your system with undetectable malware and the owner of the site will profit from your mistake. He is profiting from this and he doesn’t do anything! These sites are constantly being taken down but just as quickly they pop back up somewhere else. This concept isn’t a new one though and has been around for a long time… I don’t expect it to go away either. Just think about how many legitimate websites are out there where the web designer is cashing in on being part of this concept. You can bet it is happening.

Large financial company requires Richmond firm to perform Risk Assessment

SklarTech — Mon, 11 Jul 2011 13:56:58 +0000

Last week I received a call from one of our local Richmond firms, they provide services to a very large national financial corporation. My client told me that their client now required that their vendors must perform a Risk Assessment and then perform remediation in failed areas in order to provide services and remain as a vendor. Roughly two years ago I recommend that my client contract with us to have the Risk Assessment completed but they had decided to put it off. The initial results put them in a “high” risk and they failed the assessment provided by their client. We are looking forward in helping our client get into compliance and also solve some serious areas of risk that they had thought were “all covered” by current providers. One of the current vendors actually provided services for a “Cloud based Managed Firewall”. I’m not sure what this means but I can tell you that a firewall, managed or unmanaged, can’t and won’t keep your data secure.

I suppose you never know until you really know. We are looking forward to helping our client!

One size doesn’t fit all?

SklarTech — Fri, 08 Jul 2011 18:16:38 +0000

Over the past several years our company has experienced many changes. Some with our employees, our culture and in our offerings. We are constantly asking our clients and ourselves is what we are offering truly what local businesses need? Nearly ever service we offer is a result of one of our clients asking for our help in a specific area. I have always been open to listening to suggestions and always try to take criticism constructively and hope that we can respond to the changes and demands to always provide the highest level for the investment. I have also learned that what someone wants may not be what they need and what the have today might not be what they need tomorrow.

It is very difficult to get valuable feedback from existing clients, especially when they are satisfied with our services. Only when confidence and our trust comes into question will they have a complaint. Unfortunately at that point it is very difficult to get constructive feedback.

If there is anything we can do better or differently I would hope someone could tell us. Simply email or call me and I’ll do my best to get back ASAP.

New customer success story… Is being secure important?

randysklar — Thu, 30 Jun 2011 19:26:27 +0000

Customer success story!

Recently we hosted a seminar here in Richmond. The topic was based on Data Security with the goal to help local business leaders gain a better understanding of who is behind these crimes, what is motivating their crimes and how they are profiting from their efforts. Most business leaders aren’t aware of the current threats and trends. As a community service we provided this event complementary and as a bonus anyone who attended would be eligible to receive a complementary Risks Assessment for their business. We had over 50 business leaders in attendance, our largest event in the past four years. It is apparent that this issue is a major concern.

As a result more than 95% of the attendees agreed to our offer to have the systems checked out to see if they had been breached. One of the participants had been in the middle of a large project with another local IT firm when we arrived. They had been working on the project for 2 months longer than the projected time estimated and it appeared they would be there for a lot longer. After preforming our assessment we discovered there was little to no security in mind and the project was far from being complete. We couldn’t figure out what they had been doing for the past two months and there were many obvious issues even I was able to notice in just moments.

We are wrapping up this project and we completing another assessment to verify all security and risks were taken care of. Not only does our new client feel safe their system is optimized and running much faster than before. Bare in mind this was a brand new system that was just installed a few months ago.

I’d like to commend my team and specifically Steve Hertel for going the extra mile putting in time after hours to make sure our new client didn’t incur any unplanned downtime.

A Security breach will impact your bottom line!

randysklar — Fri, 17 Jun 2011 13:44:15 +0000

Image via Wikipedia

NorthJersy.com reported that ADP, the giant payroll firm, announced that they had a data breach. They claim that it only involved one of their clients and no real pay-roll information was exposed. However, their stock still dropped 2% that very afternoon. Even without the pay-roll information being exposed, investors seem to be weary of what will happen next.

This story is one of many examples where an IT issue becomes a financial issue for business leaders. Clients are and will be more reluctant to do business with you if they are not convinced that their data is safe in your hands. So word to the wise, if you have client data, make sure it is fully protected or we might be writing about your shares dropping in our next publication.

ADP Investigating Data Breach (liquidmatrix.org)
ADP Says Investigating Data Breach (teamshatter.com)
Payroll services company ADP reveals data breach (nj.com)
Payroll Firm ADP Investigating System Intrusion (pcworld.com)
ADP Experiences Security Breach (it.slashdot.org)
Huge Financial Company Reports Data Breach (huffingtonpost.com)
Payroll Firm ADP Discloses Data Breach (online.wsj.com)
Citigroup data breach affects 360,000 clients (oregonlive.com)
ADP’s Bittersweet Day (blogs.wsj.com)
Connecticut AG wants more info on Citi data breach (marketwatch.com)

Careful… once you post on social media it is out of your control!

randysklar — Wed, 08 Jun 2011 16:22:21 +0000

Image by TalkMediaNews via Flickr

Social media is changing the game and many famous people including politicians are finding out the hard way. Take Rep. Anthony Weiner for example. He initially claimed his account was hacked but is now excepting responsibility and admitting to his actions, well as good as any politician can admit to fault anyway.

“The New York Democrat’s blunder came from the Twitter equivalent of clicking Reply All on an email. Mr. Weiner, whom Time.com named as one of “10 Politicians to Follow” on Twitter, has said he was trying to send a Twitter “direct message,” with a link to the racy image, to only one other user. But he used the wrong coding for the message, which included his and a Seattle student’s Twitter account names, plus a link to the photo. That caused it to be sent to tens of thousands of his Twitter followers. Despite his efforts to delete it, it was quickly archived and retweeted.”

This has also happened to other famous people like Barrack Obama and Britney Spears except in their case the account was breached and false posts were made on their behalf.

These services should be monitored by you and your company and this is a reason for you to make sure that any comments being made about you or your business is dealt with. In the book, “What would Google Do?” by Jeff Jervis, he illustrates how he started a customer service revolution at Dell when he posted a Dell Sucks post after a bad experience with their service. Companies can try to ignore the fact that customers are in control now or they can embrace it or even make it a competitive advantage.

Source: Wall Street Journal | Link to the article http://on.wsj.com/iJ6qG1

Take a look at the twitter account: www.twitter.com/AnthonyForMayor

Take a look at this video… what a politician. His account was hacked, yeah right.

Social Media: One More Land Mine for Politicians (online.wsj.com)
Anthony Weiner Admits Posting Racy Pic on Twitter (webpronews.com)
Anthony Weiner Tweeted Me (thedailybeast.com)
Health Lessons From Congressman Weiner: Sexting Is Healthy (blisstree.com)
The Ultimate Twitter Guide for Politicians & Other Really Important People (dailykos.com)
Congressman said he would not resign, WHY THE HELL NOT?? (wdednh.wordpress.com)
Rep. Weiner Meant To Send Lewd Photo as Direct Message (mashable.com)
Weinergate and web literacy (thecontentlab.icrossing.com)
Rep. Anthony Weiner denies he sent link to photo of a man in underpants – Los Angeles Times (news.google.com)
Anthony Weiner: How Twitter’s features tripped him up (csmonitor.com)
The Weiner Case: When Is Tweeting Cheating? (healthland.time.com)
Don’t Be a Weiner (marketersstudio.com)
10 Common Mistakes Made by Nonprofits on Social Media (nonprofitorgs.wordpress.com)
5 Lessons Learned from Weinergate (onthebema.com)
Weiner and the Challenges Facing Social Media (politics.blogs.foxnews.com)
A Long List Of Sports Figures Who’ve Also Claimed Their Twitter Was Hacked [Twitter Weiners] (deadspin.com)
Can Congressman Weiner Teach us About Social Media? (webpronews.com)
Congressman says he did not post lewd photo on Twitter (cnn.com)
Congressman says he did not post lewd photo on Twitter – CNN (news.google.com)