BlackCSI Blog

Imagine one of your employees receives a phone call from someone who sounds exactly like you. They have your cadence, your "ums," and even that specific way you clear your throat before getting down to business. Would they be able to tell it’s a deepfake, or would they follow the instructions to urgently reset a password or move funds?

If you can’t answer that with an emphatic "yes," you’ve got some work to do. We’ve moved far beyond the era of the Nigerian Prince emails and obvious typos. We are now in the age of highly polished, AI-driven social engineering where the "bad guys" are using your own identity against your team.

It might sound crazy, but sometimes I miss the Nigerian Prince. Back in the day, the threats were almost charming in their incompetence. You had the broken English, the bizarre formatting, and the royal promises that were so obviously fake they were almost funny. If you had even a shred of common sense, you were safe.

But those days are gone.

The mobile device is deeply ingrained in modern life, society, and culture, so it will be present in the workplace. This can be a very useful thing… with the right preparations, your employees can become a lot more mobile in terms of their potential productivity.

However, mobile work isn’t without its dangers. Perhaps the most obvious risk is that a device will be lost, whether it's left behind in a rideshare or pilfered as a latte is retrieved from the barista. Either way, your business will have suffered a data breach.

Let’s talk about how this outcome can be avoided with some proactive planning, thanks to mobile device management. 

Let’s say that today was the day a cyberattack successfully infiltrated your business network. Not good, but if you have a proper data backup, you should be safe… unless the party responsible prioritizes deleting your backup files.

While we would never recommend a business skip the data backup process, it is important to recognize that traditional backups have this critical vulnerability. To remedy this, we do recommend implementing immutable backups.

With automated threats on the rise and taking over the cyberthreat landscape, you need as many ways to stay safe online as possible. Naturally, one of the most talked about topics is login security. There’s a lot of good password advice out there, but the most helpful piece isn’t repeated often enough: just make it longer.

When the time comes to upgrade any of your business tech, it makes sense that most of your attention would be on maximizing the value you get out of your new hardware. However, it is critical that you also continue to think about your discarded hardware… specifically, the data it contains.

In short, deleting files simply isn’t enough. You need to be confident that any information is truly purged or physically destroyed when you’re replacing your hardware.

Modern gadgets make running a business easier. From smart thermostats and lightbulbs to connected coffee machines, the Internet of Things (IoT) brings a lot of convenience to the workplace. However, because these devices are built for speed and low cost, they often skip the security features your business actually needs.

Essentially every smart device in your office is a potential digital back door for hackers. Let’s take a look at how IoT—as helpful as it can be—can also be a big problem.

Are you unknowingly leaving important data out in plain sight? Too many businesses will implement incredibly powerful security solutions only to ignore the basics of physical security. It’s time to address the hidden vulnerabilities that patches and updates won’t solve by scrutinizing your physical infrastructure.

Even if you’re doing everything right, business cybersecurity is a challenge. Mistakes are common. Passwords are forgotten, and physical buttons can go missing. That said, there is one form of authentication that you can’t help but have with you: yourself.

Biometrics have been experiencing a surge in popularity as a means of authentication. Let’s explore why that is.

For literal decades, we heard that a good password required a few key traits to be secure: a capital letter, a number, and eight characters. How times have changed, right?

Now, the baseline standards are similar… just multiplied to the nth degree. Let’s discuss why this is, what modern businesses now need to do, and how we can help to maintain password security moving forward.

Sometimes the toughest lessons that hurt the most are the ones we need the most, as is the case with anything cybersecurity related. You don’t want to experience a data breach, regardless of how it’s caused, but preventing them is a bit more challenging than you might at first expect. If you want to avoid losing time, money, and reputation needlessly, then take these three cybersecurity lessons into consideration today.

One of the biggest myths out there related to cybersecurity is that criminals only go after the big enterprises. Why should they care about your small operation, anyway? In reality, cybercriminals love to attack small businesses to take advantage of their weaker security infrastructures. If you’re not careful, this could lead to serious losses for your business stemming from a loss of trust, legal fees, and operational downtime.

One of the inevitabilities of starting and operating a successful business is that your IT infrastructure will eventually outgrow itself. While you might have been able to start operations with just a couple of people, the same network that used to work just fine is likely bowing under the stress of additional employees and workstations. If you want to build a sustainable and reliable infrastructure, it’s best that you rely on experts who can help your company stay as competitive as possible, regardless of how much you grow.

Not all artificially intelligent tools are built the same. One disparity that can make all the difference is whether a particular tool you and your team use is public or private.

Let’s dive into the distinction and why it matters so much.

In IT services, we often use the iceberg analogy to describe the Internet. The Surface Web, the sites you browse daily, is just the 10 percent visible above the waterline. Below that lies the Deep Web,  and at the murky bottom is the Dark Web.

For a business owner, the Dark Web isn’t just a concept from a spy movie; it is a sophisticated, unregulated marketplace where your company’s data is the primary commodity (and target). If your information is down there, it’s not a matter of if someone will use it, but when.

Let’s assume that, as a responsible business owner, you’ve established standard operating procedures for your employees to follow—including the tools they can officially use in the course of their tasks. That said, there is always the chance that someone encountered an issue and independently investigated and “fixed” it.

If anyone is using an unapproved tool or an external account to access and manipulate your business data, you have a problem… a problem known as shadow IT.

Antivirus is great and all, but it’s important in business to acknowledge that not all solutions you implement are equal. What seems like a good deal could actually put your business at risk. If your antivirus isn’t reliable, you can’t continue with business with the assurance that everything will be okay.

Let’s say, for a moment, that somewhere out there is a diligent employee—John—who works for a small business. While John means well, he has the unfortunate habit of using the same password for everything… including the marketing tool his employer has him sign up to use.

A year or two goes by. The company hasn’t touched that marketing tool in months. John has completely forgotten he has an account with it. Meanwhile, that tool experiences a significant data breach, and suddenly, the credentials to almost everything John has ever accessed are now available on the dark web.

How much would you be willing to pay to keep all of your business’ records from being locked away, or to keep them off the dark web? Hundreds? Thousands? More?

This is precisely what cybercriminals rely on when they infect businesses just like yours with ransomware. Let’s talk about ransomware a bit: what it is, why it’s so effective, and (most importantly) how to keep it from dragging your business down.

Here’s a fun thought experiment; can your team identify phishing scams and respond to them appropriately? It’s a skill that must be learned if you want your organization to be successful and safe. Today, we’re taking a look at the three big signs you’re looking at a phishing scam (and what to do about it).