You may not think too much about serious disasters. Most of us focus on the day-to-day chores of running our businesses and keeping revenues up. However, there are long term planning concerns that many firms just avoid. Those concerns are managing the risk to your business if something very bad happens. This long-term planning is called risk management and it is the dullest topic ever—until something bad happens.
Have you watched one of those horror movies where something impersonates the protagonist only to wreak havoc later? Well, website cloning does the same thing–to your business–in real life. Website cloning is one of the most popular methods among scammers to fleece you of your money.
As the name suggests, the cybercriminal first creates a ‘clone’ site of the original one. There can be a clone of any website, though retail shopping sites, travel booking sites and banks are the favorites of cybercriminals. The clone site looks exactly like the original one, barring a very miniscule change in the url.
Workplaces today have changed. They extend beyond the working hours, beyond the cubicles. Whether you are commuting to work or even vacationing, chances are you or your employees take a break from the break to reply to those important emails that require ‘immediate action’. Plus, there may even be employees who are not even on the same continent as you. What does all this mean for your business in terms of IT security? Does BYOD translate to bring your own disaster to work? This blog explores the risks of BYOD culture and offers tips on how you can avoid them.
As someone running a SMB, you probably have a lot on your plate. You are the core decision maker, responsible for growing your business, keeping your clients happy and getting all the working done. Often, when you have so much going on, one area that gets overlooked is IT. When you are so busy looking into other things, the start of IT issues may slip your watchful eyes. In this blog, we discuss the IT red flags that you need to watch out for.
In many industries, there are seasonal spikes in business around specific times. For example, CPAs/Accounting firms, though busy all year, generally see a spike in business around the time of tax planning, IRS return filing, etc., the retail industry sees a boom around the Holiday Season, and so on. During such peak times, it is common practice in the industry to employ part-time staff to meet the immediate resource needs. While this works well in terms of costs and for handling additional work/client inflow, this poses a few challenges from the IT perspective. In this blog, we explore those challenges so you know what to watch out for before bringing part-time staff on board.
So you know you are regulated by HIPAA. But in a broad sense, what must your organization do to be in compliance? First and foremost, you need to understand what HIPAA and the HITECH Act are regulating. HIPAA and the HITECH Act are regulating and enforcing the security of an individual patient’s health information. The specific information being regulated is known as Protected Health Information (PHI), also known sometimes as Individually Identifiable Health Information (IIHI), and its subset, electronic Protected Health Information (ePHI). ePHI is simply PHI stored, maintained, etc. in digital form. These are defined as any data that can individually identify a patient. That means anything that can reasonably ID a patient. Examples include SSN, medical ID, age, vmail, URLs, driver’s license number, license plate numbers, photos, names of relatives, identified test results, telephone numbers, email and postal addresses, and medical images. As can be seen, this sweeps a large swath of data under the umbrella of protected information.
You deal with HIPAA every time you visit a medical office. But what is this law that seems to constantly appear anytime you get near a healthcare provider? HIPAA is the acronym for The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996. Aside from allowing for portability of health insurance for the individual, the laws main reason for being is to ensure the protection and privacy of an individual’s medical data. HIPAA strictly regulates the security of medical data, and holds anyone who possesses or touches it in any way liable for any data breach that occurs. HIPAA (1996) and its younger cousin, the HITECH Act of 2006 strictly regulate and monitor the security of all individual medical data in the U.S.
For most of us, HIPAA is just some strange acronym for a law we stumble across everytime we visit a doctor’s office or medical clinic. Something about signing to allow the office to have access to your medical records so they can treat you. Or something like that. However, if your business has a professional […]
You have probably come across the term multi-factor authentication of late. It is an IT buzzword today and is fast becoming one of the best practices of cybersecurity. So, what is multi-factor authentication, exactly? Read this blog to find out.
The dark web is essentially a marketplace for cyber criminals. If your data has been compromised, the dark web is the place where it is traded. It could be sold by miscreants, to miscreants, who can later hack into your system or extort money from you to prevent a data leak and so on.
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