Affinity Technology Partners, together with Constangy, Brooks, Smith and Prophete LLP and the Nashville Area Chamber of Commerce’s Business Studio, are looking to change the perception about cyber security and educate small business owners on best practices to protect their businesses. The organizations are hosting two seminars entitled Small Business, BIG Target: How to Protect Your Company from Cyber Attacks, as part of National Cyber Security Awareness Month (NCSAM) on Oct. 18th and Oct. 27th.

Here we go again. We’ve previously written about the dangers of anonymous social media apps targeted at younger users, such as Yik Yak and After School. Regardless of their developers’ intentions, these apps have earned a reputation for facilitating cyberbullying. And today we add Sarahah to our growing list of app alerts for parents.

To what extent does your business rely on a high-speed internet connection? For most of our clients, a fast, reliable connection is ether extremely important or vitally important to their business operations. Almost no one can afford the service slowdowns, let alone outages, that happen far too often even with business-grade service offerings from the major ISPs.

As summer break comes to an end, both parents and kids alike take advantage of back to school sales and tax-free weekends to meet their technology needs for the upcoming school year. For kids, that translates into new tech devices to learn, have fun, and communicate with friends.

But the risks associated with technology—cyberbullying, sexting, exposure to pornography—are real and rampant. With careful planning, parent-child communication, and the right tools, however, parents can put guardrails around their kids and teens’ digital experience.

Outsourcing IT to a managed services provider (MSP) is becoming a common practice for small and mid-sized businesses. But for many of those companies, the extent of that “outsourced IT” function is support services. Seeking a help desk, they want to be sure that someone is available to address technical issues as they encounter them.

One of the biggest tech trends to emerge over the past few years has made it easier than ever to connect everyday household items to the internet. Sometimes called the Internet of Things (IoT), this new wave of innovation allows us to interact with these devices in ways we once only thought possible in Star Trek or The Jetsons.

It’s common these days for businesses to offer WiFi to their guests. For better or worse, many customers, vendors, partners, and contractors may expect to be able to access WiFi when they’re in your store or office.

There is, however, a right and a wrong way to set up guest WiFi. The right way ensures that guests can access the internet on their devices with minimal hassle, without exposing your internal resources. Setting up guest WiFi the wrong way, however, can create serious security risks.

This past weekend, the world experienced the first truly international ransomware attack. The WannaCry ransomware has infected over 100,000 organizations in 150 countries since it was first discovered on Friday. WannaCry exploits a vulnerability in older or unpatched versions of Windows in order to carry out its mission: to encrypt victims’ data, holding it hostage until the user pays a ransom of $300. It has been spread largely through the use of spam emails containing malicious attachments.

These days, busy professionals in fields from financial services to graphic design are increasingly relying on multiple apps to get their work done, often running two, three, or more apps at the same time.  And the more we flip back and forth between email, spreadsheets, and various business-grade apps in our daily work, the more extra screen real estate becomes a necessity.

Imagine that you are an employee of a small or mid-sized business who handles financial transactions. Company executives regularly send you emails asking you to send money via wire transfer. It’s just part of your job. So, you arrive at the office on a Monday morning to an email in your inbox asking you to wire money to a specific account. How do you react?

If you’ve outsourced your technology needs to a managed service provider (MSP) within the last decade or so, you’ve probably heard about remote monitoring and management (RMM) software. When listed in an agreement or on an invoice, that line item might raise at least a couple of questions: “What is this, and do I really need it?”

By now, we’re all used to using passwords to authenticate our identities online. But as we’ve grown more accustomed to coming up with and remembering passwords, cybercriminals have gotten far better at stealing them. The result is that many of our online accounts are at high risk for breach, especially because most people have bad habits when it comes to passwords. A study in 2015 found that nearly 3 out of 4 people use the same password for multiple accounts, and that 68% of people were using passwords that were five years old or older. Unsurprisingly, this same study found that 2 in 5 people surveyed had experienced some sort of security incident online.

The problem, of course, is that good password habits are difficult to learn and even harder to carry out. Thankfully, tools now exist that can drastically improve your password security. They’re called password managers.

When businesses are deciding where to host their vital resources—email, key applications, and company data—the conversation usually revolves around two options: company-owned servers at the office or servers owned and maintained by a cloud vendor (commonly referred to as “the cloud”). But a third option, though not discussed as often, might be a better fit for some businesses. And that’s data center colocation.

A couple months back, we reviewed a social media app called After School. Because the app allows teens to post anonymously, we raised the caution flag. We acknowledged, however, that After School’s developer does seem to have implemented some important safeguards to minimize inappropriate or dangerous content. Yik Yak is a different story.

Like After School, Yik Yak is asocial media app that allows it’s users to post anonymously. Unlike After school, the app contains relatively few safety features to protect younger users.