Technify IT. Consulting

27/09/2023

Pizza Hut Australia Security Breach

Pizza Hut Australia is sending data breach notifications to customers, warning that a cyberattack allowed hackers to access their personal information.

27/09/2023

Microsoft has released the September 2023 preview update for Windows 11, version 22H2, which adds frequently visited websites to the Start menu and addresses 24 issues.

14/09/2023

Multiple services online make it quite easy to reset the password for accounts by asking you to provide your email address. An email is then sent to the email address that was provided during the forgotten password phase with instructions on resetting the password.

It is extremely important to protect email services, not just because of the threat to privacy and sensitive data but because once an email account is compromised, it's very easy to compromise other accounts due to how easy it is to reset passwords as long as one has access to the email account associated with other online services.

To check if your email has been compromised in "Known Breaches" you can run a search using your email address on https://haveibeenpwned.com

Use MFA (Multifactor Authentication) on your email accounts and other services that you use and change your password once every 3-6 months using a complex password containing uppercase letters, lowercase letters, numbers and special characters.

Have I Been Pwned allows you to search across multiple data breaches to see if your email address or phone number has been compromised.

14/09/2023

I routinely still see a lot of small businesses using free email services for their business.

Due to the sensitivity of business information such as client contacts, agreements, job history, financial information and supplier negotiations this is not advisable.

There is a real risk of losing critical business data using free email services as this data is not backed up and there is a lack of support to users that engage with free services from many providers that provide free email services.

In the event the free email service you're using gets compromised this poses a high risk of losing all the sensitive business data and not being able to get that data back.

Using free email services makes it easy for cyber criminals to make contact with clients and potential clients pretending to be you.

In the event any employee has access to any of the mailboxes and leaves the company, they could easily maintain contact with clients and take off with sensitive business data.

Using free email services hurts your business brand as you're advertising the free email providers business and not your own, it makes your business also not look professional making customers less likely to buy from you or engage in your services.

13/09/2023

It's still very common for people to use easy to remember passwords and to also use the same password for multiple things. We do this because it can be difficult to remember complex passwords and several different passwords but using simple passwords and not using a different password for each service is bad security practice. This is where a password manager makes it easy to store multiple complex passwords safely in an encrypted vault and you only need to remember one complex password to access the password manager. I would recommend Bitwarden, it has a free version with a lot of features and can be used on multiple devices such as PC, tablets and phones. It also has a password generator which can be used to generate long complex passwords using special characters, upper and lowercase characters and numbers. You can then use these generated passwords for different services and save them in your bitwarden password vault and not need to remember them.

Bitwarden is an integrated open source password management solution for individuals, teams, and business organizations

10/09/2023

Ad blocking can be applied and managed at the network level. Pi-Hole is a network wide ad blocker which will block ads for all devices connected to the network, threat actors have been known to inbed malware into legit ads within websites, this is known as "malvertising". How this works is the threat actor has injected malicious code into the advertisement and it's commonly distributed by redirecting the users to a malicious site to try and scam the user into providing banking details and/or personal details. Malware can also be distributed onto the victims computer without their knowledge just from visiting the website with the infected advertisement. A network ad blocker such as Pi-Hole can mitigate this risk.

08/03/2023

01/03/2023

Looking to get rid of annoying ads when you visit websites online?

uBlock Origin is a browser extension that you can add to your browser to get rid of those pesky ads.

uBlock Origin is not just an “ad blocker“, it's a wide-spectrum content blocker with CPU and memory efficiency as a primary feature. Developed by Raymond Hill.