Whether you’re “tech aware” or not, most of us know that the human element is one of the riskiest elements of our business when it comes to our data being compromised.

2023 proved that in spades with many of the largest attacks of the year being orchestrated with “low tech” methods – whether that be social engineering as we saw with MGM or literally low tech as with the attack on Rockstar that was conducted with a cellphone, TV and an Amazon Firestick.

The holidays are truly upon us and for many of us that means traveling to friends and family and enjoying some time spent away from work and in our loved one’s company.

However, for business owners being on the go doesn’t mean the work stops and we often carry our work devices with us to keep a watchful eye on things even from afar.

The cyber attacks we typically report on are localized or contained to a specific sector or even business entity.

In Netflix’s new movie “Leave the World Behind” characters are confronted with what looked like a global cyber attack causing mass destruction and chaos, including self-driving cars crashing into each other with no driver present and planes crashing into the ocean into land with GPS absent.

We’re all familiar with the usual suspects when it comes to cyber threats, viruses, trojan horses, phishing attacks, malware and ransomware. We’ve covered these threats in great detail (here’s just a few articles on these topics: 10 scary cybersecurity statistics business owners need to know,  Zero trust or zero effort, how does your businesses security stack measure up?, Can you spot the phishing clues? And 10 tips to avoid falling for a phishing scam). Even if you’re not a technical inclined person you probably have some awareness of how to avoid these threats, such as being careful with suspicious emails and attachments or not downloading files from unknown sources.

We’ve written quite a bit about cyber security disasters and disaster recovery in that context (here are just a couple options Why every business needs a documented backup and disaster recovery strategy and Data Breached? 5 ways to reduce the impact on your business), but what about a disaster that’s truly out of your hands?

Depending on where you live there are different types of types of disasters to worry about, and some disasters such as solar flares or geomagnetic storms are a global concern.

If you’re traveling the holidays this year, we have eight tech tips to help you stay safe while using your devices on the go.

We’ve offered holiday themed tech advice before (here are a couple of our past articles on the top 10 Holiday Shopping Tips for Safer Online Shopping & 5 Holiday Tips for Your E-Commerce Business and 5 for Everyone Else). The holidays usually mean more time off which can lead to more time spent browsing the web or being able to work on things in your business you usually don’t have time for.

Intel just released a fix for a vulnerability that would make certain CPUs in jeopardy of being compromised. The vulnerability would allow an attacker to gain privileged access to machines or trigger a denial-of-service attack.

You can see the list of affected CPUs here, patching for this vulnerability may need to occur in phases including micro-updates to the BIOs, system OS and drivers.

Most of our clients are Microsoft 365 customers and enjoy the tools and applications they receive through their Microsoft 365 subscription. Many of these same clients were long time Office customers and were already familiar with the software benefits – such as Word, Office, Outlook, Powerpoint and Excel.

The end of the year is nearly here and if your business is anything like ours you might find yourself busier than ever, you may not relish the thought of adding more to an already full to do list but adding these technology related items will put you in a better position this time next year.

If you’ve ever shopped for internet service for your home or business, you’re probably aware that it’s a little difficult to tell what you’re really buying due to the marketing efforts most providers have that are more about wooing you with their “blazing fast speeds” or “reliable up times” and less about explaining the actual service.