The SMB Tech Report

Jonathan Blum Lists Top Four SMB Resolutions for New Year

Blogger Jonathan Blum has provided four technology New Year resolutions that small business owners should do immediately. First, he says, business owners should change all their business passwords to a new, highly secure password. Second, they should close down unused e-mail, business software, and social network accounts. Third, those without do not a document shredder should buy and begin to use one to guard against theft of sensitive business documents from the trash. Finally, they should change the password in their cell phones and other mobile devices. more

McAfee Publishes List of Christmas Scams

'Tis the season for, among other things, cyber-crime, and, of course, lists. Security systems provider McAfee has published its list of Internet Christmas scams and we have added some information of our own.

1. iPad Scams: Cybercriminals have send out bogus offers for free iPads both via e-mail spam and social media sites. These offers usually link to sites that harvest consumers’ credit card information. Best protection: Do not believe offers that seem too good to be true!
2. “Help! I’ve been robbed” Scam: In this exploit the cybercriminal first compromises the e-mail account or social media site of an individual to capture the e-mail addresses attached to that account. The criminal then sends out a fake message, usually to the effect that they have been robbed and need the recipient to wire money to help them get home. Do not believe any e-mails asking for emergency funds from friends or family, no matter how convincing or compelling, until you talk directly to those individuals.
3. Fake Gift Cards: Cybercrooks are spamming people with fake gift card offers, for instance, promising “Free $1,000 Best Buy” gift cards to people who “like” a phony Best Buy page and in the process disclose personal information. Best protection: Do not believe offers too good to be true!
4. Holiday Job Offers: These are the usual offers of high-paying, work-at-home jobs, which, of course, do not exist. The criminals ask for personal information such as e-mail and home address and Social Security number. Best protection: do not disclose personal information. This is a very old scam, going back to the invention of classified ads in newspapers, but it still works.
5. “Smishing” is phishing via text message. The message usually appears to come from a bank or online retailer claiming there is a problem with an account and giving a number to call to verify information. This is another attempt to capture personal information including bank account passwords. Best protection: Do not believe these messages, no matter how compelling and legitimate they appear to be. Do not click any links or call any numbers in the message. If you think your bank account has been compromised, call your bank’s main number to ask. NEVER give your password to anyone. No legitimate bank or store employee will ask for your password.
6. Holiday Rental Scam: Cybercrooks are advertising attractive properties at rock-bottom prices on phony Web sites. They usually ask for deposits via wire transfer. Best protection: Do not answer any e-mail or other messages from renters you do not know, and do all deposits by check rather than wire transfer or credit card.
7. Recession Scams: These include pay-in-advance credit schemes and pre-qualified low-interest loan offers that involve filling out forms with all the personal information criminals need to clean out your bank account. Best protection: Stay away from Internet offers.
8. Grinch-like Greetings: Cybercriminals are offering cheerful e-cards that come with hidden attachments including computer viruses, other malware, or even pornography. Best protection: Only use legitimate sources for e-cards, or, better yet, go traditional and send paper cards by mail.
9. Low Price Traps: Scammers advertise too-good-to-be-true prices on popular holiday gifts over auction sites and phony websites to steal information and money. Best protection: Do not believe offers that are too good to be true! Do not answer unsolicited offers.
10. Charity Scams: These scams ask for donations to phony charities. Best protection: Donate only to well-known charities.
11. Dodgy Holiday Downloads: These include holiday-themed jingles, screensavers, and animations that actually include malware, distributed either via Web sites or spam. Best protection: Do not run screen savers and similar stuff. At best, they steal computer resources and slow your computer down, at worst, they infect it.
12. Hotel and Airport Wi-Fi: Using public Wi-Fi hot spots, particularly in hotels and airports, is dangerous year-round. Cybercrooks hack into these networks and create a fake pass-through network connecting the people in the network to the Internet, capturing all their passwords in the process. Best protection: Use your digital cellular service rather than unprotected WiFi hot spot or turn of your computer WiFI radio while in a public location.

Lenovo/AMD Survey Finds SMBs Take Technology Risks

A survey by Lenovo and AMD reveals resource-and-cash-strapped small businesses are missing simple cost saving options while overworking employees and taking technology risks that include illegally using open WiFi networks and saving critical business files on USB thumb drives. The savings many businesses in the survey miss include the use of voice-over-Internet-protocol (VoIP) telephone/videophone services such as Vonage, Skype, and Googlevoice and many small business communications services based on these services. more 

Adobe Warns of Phishing E-Mails Requiring Registration for New Acrobat Reader Versions

Adobe's release of Adobe Acrobat X solutions has triggered a stream of fake e-mails purporting to offer a download of a new version of Acrobat Reader. Many of these require recipients to register and/or provide personal information, Adobe warns. Adobe Reader X is not available yet, but, like all previous versions of Reader is free and should be downloaded directly from Adobe's Web site. It will not be available from any other source, including via e-mail. Customers receiving one of these malicious e-mails should delete it immediately without clicking on the links. Adobe has posted information about these phishing schemes on its Product Incident Security Team blog. more

Free Tip: Generating Safer and Better Passwords

You know that you should not use personal information to create passwords and that you should change passwords on a regular basis. Yeah! So easy to know, so hard to do with everything else you have to do. Well, how about this? Pick some kind of memory aid such as

• your birthday and birthdays of family and friends
• tax day
• major holidays

You get the idea. You only need a few of these, by the way. Monthly would be good, weekly is not necessary for most SMB owners.

Next, use a random password generator such as this one.

I used it and it created this code within seconds: s6Uqu9Ra.

Almost there. Now, change a letter and a number to make the password easier to remember. Your objective is to be able to remember the password without writing it down or keying it into your smart phone or PC.

So, if you picked your birthday at the memory trigger for making the change and your name is John and you were born on January 1, then your new password is j1Uqu9Ra. You can use this same password for all situations where you need a password online or you can use it as the basis to create several new ones (use other people's names and birthdays).

Repeat every time your memory trigger prompts you to do so.

McAfee Extends Partner Program to Single Sign-On Vendors

McAfee has added a Single Sign-On (SSO) category to its Security Innovation Alliance and has signed up several leading SSO providers. By adding McAfee Endpoint Encryption to their products, they can provide their customers with systems that allow employees to access multiple applications with a single log-in, with added security levels that can include the use of smart cards and biometric identification and can use encryption to protect business data over public networks. McAfee also announced that Alliance membership has reached 103 partners. more

Security Companies Partner to Create Anti-Phishing Service

Data security service provider Imperva has integrated the Cyveillance Anti-Phishing Data Feed into its the Imperva ThreatRadar to enhance its SecureSphere Web Application Firewall. The partnership is designed to enable Imperva customers to detect phishing threats before they become a problem. more

McAfee, Riverbed Partner to Create Combined WAN Optimization and Security Appliance

Security software vendor McAfee Inc. and IT performance optimization software provider Riverbed Technology have partnered to create a wide area network (WAN) optimization and security appliance for small-to-midsized businesses and remote offices. The appliance includes a virtual instance of the McAfee Firewall Enterprise software and Riverbed Steelhead appliance. more

Network Intercept Announces Free Identity Defense Solution

Internet security company Network Intercept has announced a limited free version of its Keystroke Interface, a defense against keystroke loggers. The free download allows users with Internet Explorer to protect their electronic financial IDs when logging onto their accounts. Keystroke Interface injects a string of random symbols and numbers into the data as it is captured by a logger. more

Social Sentry Saas Service Monitors Employee Use of Social Networks

Teneros Inc. has announced Social Sentry, a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) service that monitors employee public activity on social networks such as Twitter and Facebook. It is designed to manage corporate risks related to compliance, leakage of sensitive information, human resource issues, legal exposure, and brand damage. more

Avast!, Cnet Report Malware Infecting Web Ad Services

In a report picked up by Cnet, Czech security provider ALWIL Software, provider of the Avast! PC security applications, is reporting extensive malware infiltrations of Web ads distributed by a large number of legitimate Web ad services, including Yahoo and Google Ads. These ads infect computers when a Web browser loads the ad, without requiring the user to click on anything, according to the Avast! report and the Cnet story based on it. Avast! report, Cnet report

Veracode Says 58% of Software Vulnerable to Cyber Attack

Security vendor Veracode estimates 58% of software is vulnerable to security breaches similar to those Google and the U.S. Department of Defense have experienced in recent months. The estimate is detailed in a new State of Software Security report Veracode has published. more

BitDefender and Kanguru Team to Protect Encrypted Flash Drives

Kanguru Solutions, manufacturer of secure, portable IT storage solutions, has partnered with anti-malware software developer BitDefender to provide built-in anti-malware protection for Kanguru Defender Elite Secure Flash Drives. The Defender Elite uses 256-bit AES hardware encryption, is tamper resistant, and can be remotely managed to ensure compliance with organizational policies. The addition of BitDefender's technology adds real-time virus and malware scanning. more

Microsoft Releases Products at RSA Conference to Support End-to-End Trust Vision

Scott Charney, Corporate Vice President of Microsoft's Trustworthy Computing Group delivered a keynote speech on the company's End-to-End Trust vision at the RSA Conference 2010 on Tuesday, March 2nd. In support of that vision, Microsoft released a community preview of U-Prove, technology designed to minimize the personal information disclosed for identification of purchasers in online transactions. It also released Forefront Identity Manager 2010, a part of its Business Ready Security Strategy. more

VeriSign Trust Seal Integrated with AVG LinkScanner Search Results

VeriSign Inc., and AVG Technologies have announced an agreement to display the VeriSign Trust Seal identifying safe Web sites in AVG LinkScanner search results pages. This will allow Web sites that subscribe to VeriSign to identify themselves in LinkScanner search returns, allowing large numbers of LinkScanner users, including small business employees, to more easily identify safe sites. more

Security Double-Take Offers Cloud Backup and Recovery Using Amazon EC2

Backup and recovery software provider Double-Take has announced a Cloud-based full system backup service for small-to-medium size businesses running on the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). Users back up and maintain full images of each of their company hard drives onto EC2 using the Double-Take software. In the event of a hard drive system failure, they can restore the entire environment to a new drive or computer from bare metal up. The environment can also serve as a virtual computer over the Internet on EC2 until they can restore the failed system. more

Symantec Study Shows 75% of Businesses Experience Successful Cyber Attacks with Average Loss of $2 Million

Symantec Corp.'s 2010 State of the Enterprise Security study found 42% of organizations rate security as their top issue. It found in the past 12 months 75% of organizations experienced cyber attacks, costing the victims an average of $2 million per year. The study is based on surveys of 2,100 enterprise CIOs, CISOs, and IT managers from 27 countries conducted in January. more

Brocade, McAfee Partner to Deliver Network Security Systems

Network vendor Brocade and McAfee Inc. have partnered to deliver a set of fully interoperable end-to-end network security products. As part of the partnership, Brocade will integrate critical security capabilities into its network products. more

Computershare Chooses Symantec

Global stock transfer agency and share registration service provider Computershare Ltd. has chosen Symantec Data Loss Prevention to help protect millions of confidential shareholder records after a comprehensive evaluation and a proof of concept test. more

Security Tech Data to Distribute BitDefender Security Software In Canada

Information technology distributor Tech Data will distribute BitDefender's antivirus and data secrurity systems in Canada. Under the agreement, Tech Data will distribute BitDefender systems for small home/offices, small-to-medium size businesses and large enterprises. more