Data Net Blog

We’ve been talking about social media as a good way to market if you're a small business. Facebook , in particular, can be useful not just as a marketing tool, but as a platform that can serve as your website. If you don’t have a website, Facebook offers a way to have a “faux” website. It can provide basic information about your goods and services, and it can be easily updated. Unlike a website, it takes no web skills to change the content of your Facebook page. So at the very least, this is a pretty safe way to get into the shallower waters of social media. It is important to remember to update your Facebook page. Leaving it to get stale doesn't send a good message. If you don’t care enough to keep it up to date what does that say about how you run the rest of your business?

Admit it, you don’t know all that much about cybersecurity. In this blog, we spend a lot of time discussing security issues. After all, today there are more threats than ever and many different types of problems that IT administrators, business decision-makers, and even individual employees have to deal with. Over the next two weeks, we have decided to discuss the reality of cybersecurity and what you need to know to get out in front of it. 

Pay any attention to social media? Think it's just a pastime to use up your monthly data allotment? Well, it can be just that. But it can also be a good marketing tool, especially for a small business that has a limited budget for marketing. For many very small operations, sometimes even building a website is a step too far. Many small businesses, especially individual sole proprietorships, may not have their own website. Social media platforms can become your de facto website, and make a pretty good stand-in for a small website. This can be especially true if your website is only informational. (you aren't actually using a website to sell products) Also for the provider of services, say legal, writing, etc, social media platforms may be just enough for you.

We make a consistent point to urge our readers to take their organizational cybersecurity seriously. This is because there are threats out there that are targeting your business, no matter how small it is. This week, we take a break from the itemized list of security tips to present 2022’s most devastating cyberattacks to give you an idea what hackers today can do.

Have you ever thought about password protecting a zipped folder so that only authorized individuals and users can access it? While Windows might not have built-in functionality for this type of protection, a free app called 7-Zip gives you the power to do so. Let’s go over how you can use 7-Zip to password protect a ZIP file on your Windows PC.

“Nice guys finish last.” It’s not a new idea—in fact, it’s paraphrased from a quote teasing the 1946 New York Giants for their last-place finish in their league. In business, it’s become a cliche all its own…but does the cliche actually have anything supporting it?

As it turns out, it doesn’t.

You will agree that having passwords to access your IT devices, networks and data is the first step to securing your business data. However, having passwords is not enough. The passwords have to be strong and difficult to detect or hack into. A lot of ‘smart’ devices today such as phones, tablets, and laptops come with facial recognition and fingerprint sensors that can be used in lieu of passwords. But what happens when you don’t have biometric security measures? You need to ensure that your passwords are strong and also maintain good password hygiene.

The modern company has either completely digitized their business or has at least thought about it. This complete sea change has created a lot of beneficial situations for these organizations, but one element that often gets overlooked is the process of document digitization. In today’s blog we thought we’d go through the document digitization process and why it is so potentially beneficial for businesses. 

The COVID pandemic forced businesses all over the world to adopt remote work practices, whether they were ready for them or not, and it wound up establishing full-fledged remote and hybrid positions which may never have existed otherwise. However, with these new developments come new threats, and you need to be ready to handle them as they crop up.

If the lock to your home’s main door breaks, do you fix it or just let it be? My guess is, you would get a locksmith to fix it for you at the earliest. And, what do you do if you lose the key? Use the spare key, if you have one, to get into your home, right? The situation is kind of similar when it comes to security patches and updates for your software programs. Credible software manufacturers make sure the software programs they develop offer an acceptable level of data security. However, no software is perfect, and knowing this well, cybercriminals constantly work to find vulnerabilities in popular software programs that they can exploit to gain access to your data. Security patches and software updates work to prevent this by fixing or patching the vulnerabilities.

Last week, we wrote about how patience plays a big role in people’s ability to be productive and efficient. This week we want to explore a few ways to help the people in your organization to become more patient. We all know people in our lives that seem like they could definitely take a chill pill. If that is you, using these four suggestions can help you be more patient in situations that demand it. 

We all know that basic hygiene is a must to lead a healthy life. Did you know that the same rule applies to IT as well? There’s something known as cyber hygiene that plays a key role in keeping your business healthy from the IT perspective. So, how do you ensure your business doesn’t fail when it comes to cyber hygiene? Here are a few tips.

Unfortunately, the number of cyberattacks is consistently growing and many of those attacks target business end users. This means that any account that requires a password for access could conceivably be compromised should attackers gain access to its credentials. At Data Net, we promote the use of multi-factor authentication (also known as two-factor authentication or 2FA) to mitigate some of the risk inherent with the use of password-based accounts in business. 

Entrepreneurship is extremely frightening to a lot of people, and that’s probably why a lot of people make the choice to work for others. If you think about it, a lot can go wrong; a lot more than can go right. Today, we thought we’d highlight how business owners are able to get through all of the problems to forge ahead and create successful companies.

In our blog, we talk about security and data breaches all the time. We tell you how you can take efforts to avoid them and how to prepare your organization for the inevitability of being exposed to them. With all that security talk, we should briefly describe the difference between a security breach and a data breach, because they are two different things that get lumped together quite a bit.

One of the popular internet scams that has been doing the rounds since 2017 is the one about “Free Internet”. This scam seems to resurface and somehow manages to claim quite a few unsuspecting victims. Here’s how they catch you.

People can be very productive. They can also be pretty terrible at being productive. The staff that can find consistency in their productivity typically results in a pretty successful business. Obviously, people have all types of suggestions on how to improve staff productivity, individual productivity, and a lot of it is just hitting on the same stuff. There is one variable, however, that is found in a lot of productive people: Patience. 

Who doesn’t like online shopping? Online shopping has opened up a whole new world to us. Get whatever you want, whenever you want, without wandering from store to store. It doesn’t matter if it is too hot to venture outside or if there’s a blizzard out there, you do your shopping from the comfort of your couch and the stuff at your doorstep. You get great deals, some are better than in-store specials. But, did you know cybercriminals love the concept of online shopping as much as you do. Cybercriminals are exploiting the growing popularity of online shopping to cheat unsuspecting buyers through techniques such as phishing, malware injection, etc. Here are a few tips that may work to keep you safe from being a target of cybercriminals as you shop online.

Back in December of 2021, an API vulnerability impacting Twitter was disclosed. Just a few months later, in July, data from more than 5.4 million users—obtained through this vulnerability—was put up for sale, and more recently, another hacker shared the data online. Let’s take the opportunity to examine the concept of an API attack, and what can and should be done to stop them.

Cloud-hosted computing has been around for quite some time, but it has never been as accessible as it is today.  It is now a commonly used resource for almost any type of business. In fact, the growth of cloud-based computing suggests that we are staring at a cloud-hosted future. Today, we wanted to discuss the cloud and how it has become the go-to solution for growing businesses.