What’s Happening with COVID-19 Scams

 During the COVID-19 pandemic there have been quite a few different types of scams. At first, most of the scams centered around economic relief money that was doled out to people to help prop up the fledgling economy. More recently however, scammers have focused on vaccines. Today, we will take a closer look at some of these scams, as they are growing in sophistication. 

Opportunists and COVID-19

Everytime something terrible happens, hackers are there to try and take advantage of the desperation people have. It is one of the saddest, most sickening truths that takes place in our digital society. As the pandemic stretches on, more and more scams have been reported that cover all types of parts of people’s lives. They include:

• Phishing - Phishing scams were here long before COVID-19 and will be here long after it isn’t a threat any longer. Essentially, scammers use emails that are disguised as being from a reputable and legitimate source (like the IRS or the CDC) to get people to take actions they wouldn’t normally take. Typically these messages come from what appears to be a financial institution, but they can literally come from anywhere. 
• Vishing - Vishing is phishing, but over the telephone. It’s the same strategy, but because the call seems like it is coming from a legitimate source, people will impulsively act. This can have dire consequences. 
• Smishing - Again, same concept, but this time the message is written via text message. Since people don’t think about the fact that people could be trying to fool them into giving over sensitive financial and personal information through text, they immediately act, leaving them scammed. 
• Pretexting - This is a less well-known scam, but it has been used a lot over the past year. Basically, someone will contact you directly claiming to be someone they aren’t. They typically claim to be from a government office, a financial institution, or a healthcare organization and ask for personal information to verify your identity.
• Spoofing - Spoofing can come from any medium, but in the COVID-19 era, we’ve seen a lot of spoofed social media profiles. The scammer will set up a profile with the name of a person you know, they will contact you out of the blue, but since you presumably know this person already, you will help them hack yourself. Spoofing can also be from email addresses, instant messaging accounts, and phone numbers. 
• Quid Pro Quo - This type of scam has been played up with so many people looking for any way to make ends meet. The scammer will promise the victim something in exchange for information. It may start out as a seemingly legitimate relationship, but after trust has been maintained, the victim is taken for data, money, or worse. 

What Can You Do?

Well, that’s not a simple answer, but there are plenty of things you should be doing to keep your private information out of other people’s hands. Firstly, you will always want to verify the identity of anyone that asks you for anything online. This means anyone. It can be your boss, your partner, your parents, anyone. These days scammers will do anything to get a hold of a little piece of you to take a lot from you. Verify, verify, verify.

Everyone that has an online life should understand the potential pitfalls that are out there. This perspective, along with adhering to best practices can go a long way toward keeping your personal information out of the hands of scammers.

If you would like some help coming up with a comprehensive cybersecurity strategy for your company that includes thorough training and testing, call the IT professionals at Net It On today at (732) 360-2999.

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Tip of the Week: How to Waste Less Time on Your Email

 As much as we all rely on emails throughout the workday, they can be an intense pain to manage, which only makes it a hassle to deal with and can actively make it less useful for your users. We want to help you avoid this outcome, so we’re sharing a few tips to make the management of your email that much more effective.

Unsubscribe to Things You Don’t Need

One of the biggest wastes of time in email is the clutter than builds up as the days pass. First, you wind up spending far more time in your inbox than you should, and second, it becomes far more difficult to find the important items you’ve been sent in your email.

It only makes sense to eliminate the extra messages that are left in your inbox. As they come in, consider how important they are for you to receive, and unsubscribe to those feeds as appropriate. This shouldn’t be difficult, as all promotional materials are mandated to give subscribers the capability to opt out.

Sort Emails Automatically

You can also set up your email to automatically sort your messages into the appropriate categories as they come in. These categories will be called different things based on the email solution you’ve chosen to use—in Gmail, they’re referred to as “labels,” while Outlook calls them “folders.” Once you’ve defined the categories you want to use, you can set up filters to automatically sort the emails into the appropriate categories.

This means that your email comes in presorted, or you could take more of a manual route and add it to a category set aside for materials you intend to review later. You can set aside categories for specific contacts, for specific topics, whatever criteria works best for your purposes.

Write Email Templates

How many of your emails basically follow the same format? To help you save time, you can write these emails once and, if you save the copy as a template, only have to customize it a little each time you send it afterwards. Naturally, this small investment of time can make your workflows moving forward much more efficient.

Check Your Email Less, and Only Respond When Needed

Finally, one of the most effective ways to reduce the time you spend managing your email is to simply stop checking it so often. Clicking the “check mail” button can be oddly addictive, so make sure you and the rest of your team are resisting the temptation as much as is practical for each person’s individual role.

On a related note, a lot of time can be wasted by responding to emails that, frankly, don’t require a response. Make sure your team is using their best judgement as they review (and send) their emails, only checking in when needed or requested. It helps to remind your team that not every email that hits their inbox necessarily requires their full attention. Make sure that everyone knows what to look out for and focuses their energies on those messages.

Why Businesses are Embracing Network Monitoring

 Your technology infrastructure is perhaps one of the most important elements for your business, which means that you need to be sure that it is always prepared to perform as it should. Unfortunately, this can sometimes be a challenge. Let’s go over how you can address this challenge so that you can accomplish as much as possible.

Examining the Importance of a Business’ Infrastructure

There is little question that a business’ computing network is one of its most crucial assets, almost definitely being the most utilized each day. Consider your own usage for a second: how many of the processes you undergo every day are somehow made more efficient by the integration of technology? Quite a few common tasks have been made more productive by incorporating IT, with communication commonly benefitting as well.

By this logic, your operational success is directly related to your network’s continuity, which means that cyberthreats and technology issues should be considered threats to your success and, in the worst of cases, your business’ survival.

Recognizing this, many business owners, leaders, and other decision makers are already acting to minimize these kinds of risks. One action that many have undergone is to adopt monitoring solutions that help them to keep an eye on their technology and network infrastructure.

Why Monitoring Your IT Infrastructure is a Good Plan

It all depends on your perspective. Would you rather be aware of issues that were on your network so that they could be fixed, or would you rather be unaware and allow them to continue being a detriment to your operations?

I know how I would answer this question.

While the term “monitoring” is somewhat reminiscent of surveillance, this context is almost entirely positive. Using various tools, you are given the capability to keep an eye on the whole of your business’ infrastructure to better spot issues so that you can resolve them more efficiently. These monitoring tools take a variety of considerations into account, including:

• The health and functionality of your actual infrastructure
• The capability and security of your network
• The efficacy and availability of your team’s business applications

With the kind of monitoring tools we’re referring to, you’ll get greater transparency into your network’s health, allowing you to mitigate any factors that could lead to downtime. Naturally, this level of monitoring takes no small amount of time… time that should be spent by your team striving toward your organization’s goals.

Trust us to monitor your solutions for you.

Net It On has extensive experience in providing remote monitoring and maintenance services to businesses a lot like yours, promptly catching and containing many IT issues before they can detract from your business processes. We’re also on-hand to assist your team members with any technical issues they may encounter with our professional and prompt support services.