White house releases a National Cybersecurity Strategy

The beginning of this month, the White House released a new National Cybersecurity Strategy.  This is the first strategy released since 2020.  The strategy is built on 5 pillars.  Those pillars are: For those of us in the Small Business community, Pillar 3 is the one that is most likely to affect us.  There are…

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Is Multifactor Authentication Enough?

As more organizations are moving to multifactor authentication (see our reference article “Who are you…who who?”), cyberattackers are finding ways around the authentication method.  As reported in Dark Reading, cyberattackers are using objects called session cookies that are temporary text files that identify you when accessing a web site.  Because browsing is a stateless (every…

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An interesting twist on a credential theft

Recently, a client got caught by a malware operator.  I’m writing about this since the attack structure is a little different than what I have seen in the past.  For a little background, the client is a single person professional practice.  There are only three mailboxes in the client’s Microsoft 365 account, his personal one,…

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It’s springtime in Chicago – Here come the vendor shows

Every spring in Chicago, vendors start holding conferences updating IT professionals on the new products and services they are offering.  The ASCII Success Summit and the ChannelPro SMB Summit are two of the larger shows going around the country.  Yes, a lot of the sessions deal with how an IT professional can run their business…

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Create your own Cyber Security Action Plan

Since the Internet is connected everywhere, most cyber security actions are the same everywhere. The National Cyber Security Centre in the UK has developed a simple 5-minute questionnaire on your cyber security practices and will develop a cyber security action plan for your home or small business.The questionnaire can be found at https://www.ncsc.gov.uk/cyberaware/actionplan. It takes…

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Welcome to the Small Biz Security Site

After several years of planning, hours of work done by multiple people, the SmallBizSecurity.net website is now a reality.  The idea for this site started several years ago when I was looking for a project to do in retirement from actively supporting the IT infrastructure for multiple small businesses in the Chicago area.  Talking to…

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