One Up Solutions Northwest Blog

If you’ve been reading this blog for any length of time, you’ve seen us reference a phishing attack. Whether you are being asked by some supposed Nigerian prince to fork over money or you are getting an email by what seems to be your bank that directs you to download an attachment, you are probably a potential victim of a phishing scam. The difference between being a potential victim and a victim is knowing how to identify it. Today, we’ll give you five ways to identify a phishing message so that you—or your company—won’t be scammed.

If there is one thing we tell every would-be client of ours, it is that it is essential that they secure their data with a comprehensive backup and recovery system. This is not to make our lives easier or to sell products, it is a fact, and said strictly for their own benefit. Even the smallest organizations need protection against situations that could put all their staff’s hard work in jeopardy. Let’s take a look at why backup is so important.

Telework has become crucial for businesses to sustain themselves right now, as remote work became a hard and fast requirement in the face of the coronavirus. However, if businesses aren’t careful, they could trade one issue for another in exposing themselves to security threats.

VoIP—Voice over Internet Protocol—is an incredibly useful tool for today’s businesses to make use of, especially in terms of improving productivity. Let’s consider a few capabilities that can give you and your team a leg up.

Since the onset of the coronavirus, many businesses have managed to sustain themselves through remote work—also commonly known as telework. While this strategy has allowed quite a few businesses to survive, it has also opened them up to security threats. Here, let’s focus on one such threat: vishing, or voice phishing.

If I were to tell you that one variable was responsible for more than 80 percent of cyberattacks, what would you guess that variable was? If you guessed “stolen access credentials,” you’d be correct. The traditional username/password combination may soon be a thing of the past as more tech companies transition to alternative authentication measures.

Modern society is greatly focused on the virtue of hard work, of productivity. This has led to a kind of unspoken prejudice against breaks in the workplace, that any break that is not earned is the sign of an unproductive employee. As it turns out, the opposite is true. This week, we’re going over how you can turn your breaks into a way to accomplish more in the workplace.

The United States of America is well into its 2020 election season. Social media platforms, and other online services, are taking notice. Given the misuse of social media and other platforms in past contests, there is little wonder that there is some very real pressure on these platforms to establish policy and security measures to prevent these behaviors this time around.

Here, we’ll take a neutral look at the situation, and explain the initiatives that online platforms are now enacting.

We’ve not been shy about promoting the use of VPNs (virtual private networks) as a means of protecting your security while you are online. However, we wanted to take a bit of time to specify what a VPN can - and cannot - do to help you.

Email is easily one of the most commonly (and most often) used business tools there are, but as with any tool, some options are better than others. This week, we’re giving you some tips on how to best use email in your business by using hosted email.

Ransomware is the scariest type of malware out there. It can have a myriad of negative effects on a business, yet it seems to still be on the fringe of the mainstream. Today, we thought we would give somewhat of a refresher course on ransomware. 

With the given pandemic, a lot of people have had a bit more time on their hands, so it makes sense that many are turning to streaming services and the like for their entertainment. Unfortunately, this has not gone unnoticed by cybercriminals.

Let’s take a few moments and examine the practice of credential stuffing.

As a smartphone gets older, it’s battery will start to degrade. For years it was as simple as replacing the battery on the device, but over the past several years, no major smartphone manufacturer builds devices with removable batteries. Fortunately for users, the Android OS has made it a point to build power settings into the software that provides them the ability to manipulate how power is used on the phone. Today, we will take a look at some of the settings you can use to keep your device running longer.

The improvement in technology directly contributes to the amount of productivity business sees. One place this is evident is in the way in which businesses use collaboration tools to move business forward. Let’s take a brief look at what exactly we mean by collaboration tools and how they benefit the businesses that use them. 

Point of sale software and solutions have long offered massive benefits to businesses, with these benefits growing as the technology has advanced. Let’s look at how the POS system has developed over the years to offer the business utilities and benefits that it does today.

How many times have you gone to the store and bought something that you already had? Unfortunately, this happens all the time, but fortunately it’s usually a half gallon of milk or a loaf of bread. When it happens in your business, it can be much more expensive. Today, we will advocate for an inventory strategy that will keep you from spending wads of cash on redundant investments. 

If your business is like many others, you’ve pushed off some of your more capital-intensive plans and focused on efficiency. Now that things are starting to reopen in many places, it’s been made clear that keeping your business running with remote workers is a good strategy, but you can’t keep your projects on the back burner forever. Using video conferencing solutions to help run your projects can be a good stopgap that can give your business some flexibility. Let’s take a look. 

As businesses have been allowed access to more advanced tools, the cloud and its capabilities have been shown to be among the most useful to operations. Let’s examine some practical applications of the cloud to see why this is.

The password is the core element of both data security and user authentication. This makes the construction of them extremely important to protecting digital assets. Unfortunately, not everyone understands how to construct passwords that actually work to protect the information on the other side. Today, we will discuss how to build a solid password that works to keep your digital resources safe.

As businesses of all kinds either actively reopen or find themselves swiftly approaching that point, the ongoing status of COVID-19 guarantees that these organizations must carefully evaluate how to proceed. With numbers rising at the time of this writing, it is important that you establish the means to protect your employees from infection and illness.