You’ve gotten your business’ security needs addressed—from your network architecture to company mobile devices, you feel protected against attacks.

But what about the huge gap between your advanced security system and your end users? Do your employees understand the basics of cyberattacks as well as how to prevent them—and if not—report them?

With internal threats nearly outpacing external ones, IT security training in Northern Virginia has become crucial for businesses both large and small. Here’s why IT security training is absolutely essential for your team—both management and staff—to better protect your business.

Work to Prevent Cyberattacks

Having a team that has some basic knowledge of how cyberattacks work as well as the role they play in preventing these attacks is the goal of IT security training in Northern Virginia. A team that’s trained on IT security can fill the gaps in your security protocol and help prevent attacks.

Cyberattacks are not only detrimental to both a business and its customers, they’re also costly. The average security breach for a small business costs $38,000 per attack. For large businesses, the number is even higher at over $800,000. Can your business afford to keep exposing itself to cyberattacks?

You don’t have to keep your company at risk. Through IT security training in Northern Virginia, you and your staff can become more educated about IT security and learn best practices to significantly reduce your risk of a breach.

Enhance Team Skills

Preventing cyberattacks is a team effort. Developing team skills through IT security training in Northern Virginia can not only keep your team updated on new security issues and company policies, but can also strengthen your workforce.

A good security program includes every staff member, not just management. Everyone has a role to play when it comes to handling cyberattacks or threats. All employees should be equally invested in your company’s security, and trainings are an excellent place for people to learn together.

Your personnel can respond seriously to attacks or even just suspected threats, be aware of how to manage these incidents and, more importantly, how to avoid them.

Through enhancing your team’s IT security awareness and skills, you improve your security without even touching your infrastructure. From secure remote working to physical security and email and password security, these trainings are essential.

Retain Customer Trust

IT security training in Northern Virginia teaches some of the most basic skills that every organization needs. After all, there’s no question that your company will experience a security breach—the only uncertainty is when and on what level it will happen.

Good security is about more than protecting your business. It involves safeguarding customer data and showing that your company genuinely cares about the impact your business practices have on the security of sensitive customer information.

IT security training in Northern Virginia teaches your employees skills that help prevent breaches and better secure customer information and company data, therefore protecting your customer’s trust and loyalty.

Small and medium-sized businesses are just as much at risk as large corporations for cyberattacks, as small businesses usually lack professional security solutions. Is your business prepared to lose customer trust and its integrity by neglecting a fundamental part of its IT security such as employees?

Get Secure Today

Your business can gain a more comprehensive solution to security through IT security training in Northern Virginia. Whether you’re a small business or an enterprise-level one, security is a paramount concern and affects your business both today and in the future. When you’re ready to enhance your team’s skills, improve security, and maintain your customer’s trust, consider IT security training!

With cybercrime growing more and more sophisticated, having a robust email security program in place is mandatory.

There are several ways to approach email security, each with different benefits for small-to-medium sized businesses.

If you are looking for an email security program for your DC-area company, take a look at the options below and call Solvere One at (202) 905-2722 to learn more.

Email Encryption for Business

Encryption prevents emails from being accessed by anyone other than the sender and intended recipient.

You can use an encryption program to only encrypt messages that have specific content (attached files, personally identifiable information, etc.). Another option is to encrypt all of your outgoing email.

The challenge for most small-to-medium sized businesses is that encryption software can be complicated to the point of becoming a hindrance to efficient communication. This is why Solvere One encourages clients to apply a user-friendly email security program like Encryptics for Email.

Making Email Encryption Easy

Encryptics for Email can be used with Microsoft Outlook to secure communication with all recipients and senders. A simple software download is all that is needed for outside parties to have their replies encrypted. This program also allows you to subject your sent messages to certain protocols—like disallowing printing, forwarding, copying, and saving.

Companies whose employees work via mobile device or remote office can use Encryptics for Email just as easily, as also protects mobile communication and can function as the data security component of a broader Mobile Device Management (MDM) solution.

Email Security for DC, Maryland, and Virginia Businesses

Solvere One can help you determine what level and style of email security is right for your company or organization. Contact us for effective email security solutions!

More Network Security Solutions from Solvere One

• Virus and firewall protection and monitoring for business
• Secure instant messaging
• Content filtering

Get a free network security review from Solvere One!

 Establishing IT compliance doesn’t just safeguard customer data—it keeps your data safe as well. When it comes to decreasing your compliance risks, keeping in line with regulations both within your industry as well as your state is crucial.

Although not meeting compliance regulations has some heavy consequences, it’s constantly becoming more of a challenge to keep up with IT regulations. How can you reduce your compliance risks to keep the trust of your customers and avoid penalties and fines?

Here, we help you better manage your security threats with some simple changes any business has the ability to make.

Train Your Employees

Although your fear of security threats might be focused outside of your company, the reality is that your employees actually end up being the biggest risk to your business.

This is because not all employees are as well-versed in security best practices as your security team, yet they have access to sensitive information as well as sites on the web, including phishing emails. How can you stop these compliance risks from threatening your security?

By training your employees, you can help protect sensitive data. Schedule trainings to teach your employees about how to recognize security threats, how they can better protect your system, and what they should do if they feel an attack has been launched.

This simple, cost-effective method can help reduce your compliance risks and stop employees from engaging in harmful security habits.

Consider Mobile Device Security

 More employees are on their personal phones now than ever before. This makes it imperative that your business has a protocol in place to stop unauthorized access to sensitive data on an employee’s mobile device.

Whether their mobile phone or tablet is the property of your company or not, standards need to be in place to protect your data. To reduce compliance risks, you can invest in data encryption, minimize or eliminate the ability to store data on devices that don’t have the proper security, and allow IT to remotely access devices to wipe data in the event that a device has been misplaced or stolen.

Third-party apps also increase compliance risks. Employees may be using these apps to transfer data or share it with other employees, when these apps aren’t compliant with your security measures. You can help configure mobiles so that only authorized apps that are in compliance can be downloaded.

When it comes to mobile security, consider what standards need to be in place to minimize the chances that a hacker would gain access to data as a result of careless mobile security measures.

Invest in Cloud Solutions

 Migrating to the cloud under a trusted provider can allow you to better meet IT compliance needs and reduce compliance risks.

Cloud providers have the flexibility to adapt to compliance regulations as they change and even better fit your budget requirements. Cloud solutions are highly customizable and can ensure that your data is secure regardless of what IT compliance standards you need to meet.

While it might seem risky to move your files to an outside data center, the opposite is true—these centers are some of the most secure places you could imagine. The professionals behind cloud solutions can help you meet all necessary requirements and reduce compliance risks without the headache.

Achieving IT compliance and reducing security risks is easy when you know the areas that you need to focus on for your company. Remember that employees pose the biggest threat to your security. Keep mobile devices in mind when considering company security on all technology, and if you haven’t already, consider cloud solutions to mitigate risk!

You might be surprised to learn that many IT professionals tend to be more concerned about internal security threats to a business than external ones. Why is this?

Employees are typically the weakest link between your security measures and security breaches. Employees can accidentally install malware, compromise company data, abuse computer privileges, or even steal information unknowingly.

Security breaches are much more common than many businesses realize, which is why end user security awareness training is so important. With internal threats becoming more prevalent than external ones, conducting these trainings for your staff might just save your business!

End User Training Is an Important Investment

End user security awareness training is absolutely an investment. Unfortunately, the need for these trainings isn’t always accounted for in the security budgets of companies, as many businesses are too focused on external threats.

The reality is that end user security awareness training can make your employees more competent and aware of the role they play in keeping your company secure, therefore better protecting your systems.

IT security is an ever-changing field. How are your employees supposed to keep up with changes to company policy, system updates, and new threats? Security training for your team can help.

From helping your employees recognize threats to training them to properly handle security incidents, many cyber attacks can be circumvented simply by raising employee awareness of how they affect your company’s security.

Decrease Frequency and Intensity of Threats

Without end user security awareness training and prevention solutions, internal threats will increase. IT security is more dependent on your system’s users than many companies realize. These end users should be able to recognize attacks, avoid threats, and report incidents as quickly as possible.

Your team may not be trained in security, leading to a lack of awareness of cybersecurity threats as well as how to handle them. Many employees use systems that are unmonitored or may even have access to systems they have no need for.

End user security awareness training is absolutely relevant for people who affect your workplace daily. With businesses becoming more dependent on technology and IT solutions, these trainings are a must for both management and employees.

The future success of your company may just depend on your employees having the necessary skills to know what a security threat might look like and simply reporting this threat to your in-house or outsourced IT team. The right training can make this process much simpler and more effective for your entire team.

Augment Company Security

Remember that no IT security solution is completely effective against threats. Cybersecurity threats and attacks are evolving daily. The people behind these attacks often realize that your employees are an element of your business you can’t predict and have little control over when it comes to end user security.

Employees don’t want to sabotage your company—they often just aren’t aware of security best practices, how they create vulnerabilities in the system, and even unknowingly install viruses on your system. End user security awareness training can help.

These trainings can also keep company policy in addition to IT security fresh in their minds. Making employees aware that security is everyone’s job is essential, so consider conducting a new end user security awareness training whenever company policy is changed or updated.

Are you aware of how your employees and even management are affecting the security of your daily business operations? To prevent threats and create a more comprehensive security solution for your entire organization, consider conducting end user security awareness training. These trainings can greatly improve your business’ security solutions through your most important asset—your employees!

When businesses start thinking about moving to the cloud, their first concern is typically “is the cloud secure enough?” It’s an important consideration.

A few years ago, many IT experts insisted that no, the cloud was not secure. But the technology has advanced quickly, and so have the needs and attitudes of business owners and managers.

Data Security No Matter Where the Data Is

If you or your management team is skeptical of the cloud’s security, you may want to assess your on-site system’s security. Is everything there as secure as it could be? (You can find out by taking advantage of our free network security review.) Chances are, your data might be more secure in the cloud.

Best Practices for Cloud Security

Cloud security, when done correctly, is incredibly robust. Make sure your cloud provider is fully implementing the following:

• Antivirus and intrusion detection solutions
• Application firewall
• Attack mitigation tools for DDoS attacks
• Content delivery network
• Firewall segregating environments
• Intrusion detection tools
• Log correlation
• New generation firewall

For cloud-based email:

• Anti-spam and antivirus protections
• Creation of specific rules for blocking
• Data leak control
• Email monitoring

Your code must also be secured, and you must have a strictly-adhered-to access management policy in place.

What Does the Cloud Offer Small Businesses?

The cloud is:

• Elastic– Cloud computing services are completely elastic. You can pay for as much or as little service as you need—making your IT department more cost-efficient.
• On-Demand– Cloud computing services are delivered to you and billed on demand.
• Fully Managed– Solvere One manages your cloud services, meaning less demand for your in-house IT department.

Cloud computing services have revolutionized the way companies are doing business. IT departments leveraging cloud services can provide superior IT support with lower costs, increased accessibility, and more flexibility.

Learn more about cloud services and cloud security. Call Solvere One at (202) 905-2722 with questions—we are here to help.

Christmas can bring many things. It can bring joy, happiness, presents and good food for all but it also brings with us scammers. Now we have all experienced scam e-mails, scam phone calls, and the like but as the holidays ramp up scammers become increasingly more sophisticated. So, it’s more important than ever to keep an eye out.

DomainTools recently announced that of 1,000 customers in the UK surveyed 20% of them were caught by phishing e-mails pretending to be from a legitimate brand.

Of that 20%, 16% did not even realize they had fallen for the scam because of the legitimacy of the e-mail. This led to virus infections, stolen personal data and purchase of fake products.

While this survey was done in the UK the same can be said here for us in the US.

Scammers rely on this time of year to catch you off guard in an increasingly online shopping world. According to the E-Commerce Fraud report by Experian there was an increase in e-commerce fraud attacks of almost 30% last year over 2016 and those numbers only continue to grow into a virtual shopping society.

The Pad Lock – No Longer safe

In the earlier days of https there used to be a saying “look for the padlock.”

It was a way of knowing that your data as secure. Safe. Unfortunately, that may not be the case anymore. Last year Phishlabs released a report that showed a sharp increase in the number of phishing websites that use the padlock security icon.

This means that checking the lock is no longer safe anymore and it is good to remember that https only means you data is transmitted securely and does not mean the site is legitimate. So how can we combat this?

• Only go to sites you trust.
• Never save your credit card information to shopping sites.
• Always verify that the e-mail comes from a trusted e-mail address.
• If you receive a suspicious e-mail reach out to your IT provider and ask them to review the e-mail.
• Never go to a site through an e-mail you haven’t vetted.

Here is an example of what appears to be a secure e-mail. It ended up in the users spam mailbox.

In the hustle of the shopping session this e-mail could easily be something that you click on to update the information. It looks like FedEx but there are some signs. The @return.poneytelecom.eu links to a .eu domain (Europe) and doesn’t bear any of the marks of a normal fedex return e-mail address.

Another Trick Is To Hover Over The Link

We hovered over update my address and you can see the following. None of these look remotely like fedex links do they?

We want you to have a safe holiday season of shopping and fun. In order to do that we want to make sure that you are safe. If you ever have any doubts about a website or an e-mail please do not hesitate to reach out and we’ll be happy to assist in anyway we can.

Why Outsource Your Managed Security?

Outsourcing your network security allows you to get the most innovative, up-to-the-minute managed security services at a much lower cost than hiring onsite, specialized IT staff. A qualified network security provider will always be updated with the latest security patches and technologies—leaving you to enjoy peace of mind while you manage your business.

What Do Managed Security Services Cover?

• Access Controls and Identity Management – Identity proofing, credentialing and granting access via two-factor and multi-factor authentications. We also offer a unique authentication system through Anakam TFATM that uses cell phones, pagers, and home or office phones that offers an 80% savings over hard-token key fob systems.
• Data backup – Implementing a sound backup and recovery plan is critical in order to minimize loss of user data and database corruption in the event of even the smallest disaster. Solvere One’s managed network security assessment will help you to first identify your overall needs, determine the types of backup options available, help choose which option is best for your company, and prepare plans and policies followed by execution and maintenance.
• Content Filtering – Ensures that parameters are placed on which Internet sites can be accessed and what bandwidth limitations should be set in order to avoid recreational surfing, and also ensuring adequate bandwidth for critical business needs. Content filtering helps your company save money and increase productivity.
• IM Instant Messaging Auditing and Control – Policy management and perimeter security for Instant Messaging, Skype, and other real-time web-based communications. This service also provides the capability to identify and stop spam, viruses, worms, rootkits, keyloggers, bots, and other “greynets” designed to gather and destroy sensitive data.
• Incident Response, eDiscovery, and Information Assurance – Using forensics, computer audits, insider threat and incident response, and other tools so that clients can see what is stored or occurring on any computer in their network, and if necessary, forensically preserve and/or remediate it without disruption of current operations.
• Virus and Firewall Protection and Monitoring – Making sure that your network is continually monitored and checked for suspicious content, unexpected traffic, and other anomalies that cause unwanted behaviors through intrusion prevention systems (IPS).
• Windows RMS (Rights Managed Systems) technology – Windows RMS enables organizations to “control” information. Working with the highest level of encryption, content security is addressed in storage, in transit, and as it is being used – ensuring against malicious and/or accidental misuse.
• Wireless Security – Advanced wireless intrusion prevention systems (WIPS) put in place to counteract wireless intrusion risks, allowing for the continuity of operations.

Can Managed Security Services Keep Cloud Applications Safe?

Yes. And many experts say that using an outside managed security service is typically more effective for cloud computing, since cloud security requires more advanced IT skills as well as increased bandwidth. It’s likely far more beneficial for your company to rely on an outsourced MSS than to keep an in-house IT staff up to speed while continually paying more money to get needed additional bandwidth.

MSS Outsourcing in DC, Maryland, and Virginia

Learn more about the benefits of outsourcing your managed security services to Solvere One by calling us today at (202) 905-2722. Or contact us online for more information.

Cryptolocker is just as creepy as its name sounds. This phishing scam encrypts data from your system and holds it ransom until you transfer money to the criminals behind it. And even when people do pay, they often don’t get their files back.

An earlier version of Cryptolocker was demolished in 2014 but a new version has recently emerged.

How can you protect your company’s network from Cryptolocker? Establish protocols, update your security system, and make sure you have a strong backup system in place.

First, let’s take a look at how Cryptolocker gets inside your network.

How Does Cryptolocker Work?

The Cryptolocker malware is quick, streamlined, and nefarious.

• The criminals behind Cryptolocker will use recognizable corporate names like Amazon and send phony delivery slips and invoices via email. Opening an attachment from these emails allows the malware to infiltrate local hard drives and mapped network drives.
• The malware then contacts a server run by its senders. The systems exchange information and the encryption begins. Cryptolocker can encrypt every file it finds.
• To inform the user of the virus, the malware presents a screen that tells you how much money it wants (usually anywhere from $300 to $500, accepted in bitcoin or another untraceable currency) to decrypt your files by a specific deadline.

Some companies and individuals that have chosen to pay the ransom never got their decrypted files. The best protection from Cryptolocker is prevention.

How to Protect Your Network from Cryptolocker

Having a solid security system in place is critical. Having staff protocols in place is priceless.

Behind the scenes:

• Make sure your antivirus software is updated. Although some experts say that antivirus is no match for Cryptolocker
• Update your security system on time
• Install intrusion prevention systems
• Implement the 3, 2, 1 backup rule – Keep three copies of every important file: one original, one stored on another type of media and one stored offsite
• Consider blocking attachments

In the office:

• Insist on safe computing practices – make security a priority and get buy-in from your team
• Make sure employees know to never click a link or open an attachment from an unfamiliar or suspicious source—and to notify IT immediately if they encounter anything questionable
• Encourage employees to increase their web browser security settings

Get MSS Support in DC, Maryland, and Virginia

If you are looking for network security solutions custom-designed for your business, contact Solvere One today!