Ulistic Projects Blog

November 5, 2022

Three Ways Managed Services Providers Can Help Your Business Grow

Three Ways Managed Services Providers Can Help Your Business Grow

Key Points in This Article

Working with an MSP can provide businesses with the necessary resources to grow.
MSPs can help businesses save time by absorbing time-consuming yet fundamental tasks.
They can also help companies save money by leveraging their insights and experience to increase productivity and offer specialized services where there are gaps in-house.

Business executives often think of Managed Service Providers (MSPs) in the context of their IT departments. They think that when they followed their CIO or IT director’s advice to hire one, they approved an IT solution to IT problems. But MSPs aren’t just technical resources to be leveraged when the network goes down. Reputable MSPs can offer businesses of all sizes across industries the keys they need to unlock their full growth potential. MSPs can leverage their IT expertise to help businesses save time and money, increase productivity, and earn revenue.

How can MSPs help businesses accelerate their growth? Here are three ways that working with a reputable provider can help you grow your business.

Improving Your Business’ Productivity

Working with an MSP, you can determine the best IT infrastructure to support your unique business. And not only can you design an operating environment that helps you maximize employee productivity while minimizing downtime and reducing the risk of system failures. Your MSP can usually manage your infrastructure, saving you time and ensuring your operations run smoothly.

Moreover, many MSPs offer round-the-clock coverage, while most IT departments cannot. MSPs can resolve an overnight network issue before the first employees arrive in the morning, whereas those employees in businesses without one will face some downtime in the morning. And the longer your systems are down, the more revenue and customers you may lose.

MSPs also work with multiple clients across industries. Accordingly, their staff has developed a wealth of knowledge about technical and business problems requiring IT solutions. Drawing on their experience, MSPs can recommend, help you plan, and deploy practical solutions that help you optimize your business’ productivity.

Further, many MSPs can take helpdesk management and other time-consuming fundamental tasks off your hands. In fact, they usually can do so more effectively and efficiently than you can. You will no longer consume valuable in-house staff time with a daily flood of mundane requests from your organization. Letting your MSP partner take over helpdesk management and other similar tasks allows your staff to work on higher-level activities, like strategic planning, revenue-driving IT activities, cybersecurity, and more.

Helping You Minimize Costs

An MSP can save your company the need to hire additional specialists in in-demand areas like cybersecurity. MSP staff can complement the work of your own in-house staff, filling in critical gaps where you have talent deficits. Further, MSPs typically bill using either a recurring monthly fee or a per-use fee model that allows you to adjust the services you need as necessary. If demand begins to surge, you can rapidly scale up the support and services you need. And if you no longer need a specific service, you can quickly remove it from your service contract.

When working with an MSP, businesses often find substantial cost savings in two additional areas. MSPs can often help businesses obtain the hardware and software they need at lower-than-market rates. That’s because MSPs maintain large supplier networks and are often able to secure preferred pricing. And because they can, they can help you obtain and deploy applications and solutions that you’ve long avoided but can substantially impact your business.

Second, many businesses often find that their MSP partners have identified seemingly simple tweaks to existing IT infrastructure that significantly reduce costs and save time. MSPs not only bring their experience working with other clients to bear but also bring an outsider’s perspective. Fresh eyes on a seemingly intractable problem or bottleneck often yield a solution.

Mitigating Risks and Threats

In today’s world, it’s no longer a matter of whether a cybercriminal will target a business but of when. And cyberattacks can be devastating, with the physical, financial, and reputational costs often high enough to put a company out of business. While preventing an attempt is impossible, you can radically reduce the risk of it being successful by designing and implementing the right cybersecurity plan.

But most in-house generalists don’t have the expertise, time, or resources to handle the most sophisticated threat actors. However, MSPs and Managed Security Service Providers (companies primarily offering managed cybersecurity services) can handle these threats. MSPs and MSSPs not only employ some of the best cybersecurity talents around. But because they work exclusively in the field, they can keep up-to-date with the threat landscape in a manner that in-house professionals cannot.

Moreover, MSPs and MSSPs usually have access to sophisticated security tools most businesses have not invested in. This combination of cybersecurity expertise, resources, and dedicated time is what you need to safeguard your business to the greatest extent possible. But cybercriminals are simply one threat.

All it takes is one accident, weather event, or system malfunction to result in potentially catastrophic data loss. And in the event an incident occurs, you must be able to ensure you restore your operations quickly. But many businesses don’t have a backup and disaster recovery plan. Others fail to check to ensure their data is backed up regularly. Still, others lack business continuity plans that can help them recover rapidly. And of those that do, many are inadequate and untested.

MSPs can help businesses put the plans they need in a crisis. Doing so can also free up staff to work on other projects. Moreover, when you let an MSP manage your infrastructure, you can insulate your business from the inherent risks of managing your own own-prem data center. An MSP can help you quickly return to total operational efficiency, which you need when disaster strikes.

These scenarios may not seem to have much to do with growth. But engaging in this kind of defensive work takes staff time and resources, which, when you work with an MSP, can be freed up to focus on revenue and productivity. Additionally, a crisis can quickly torpedo your growth if not properly managed. So it’s crucial to ensure you have the right plans in place to manage one.

Working with an MSP can help you increase business productivity by saving you time in multiple ways. When your in-house IT staff has more time, they can help you with product development, sales platform optimization, and other revenue-driving activities. They can also help other departments become more productive when they have the time to think through and deploy new technology solutions to longstanding problems. MSPs can also help you save money by reducing the need for large-scale hiring and optimizing existing resources. And they can help you safeguard your business, which faces more threats than ever.

November 3, 2022

Improving Communications With Microsoft Teams’ New Scheduled Chat Feature

Improving Communications With Microsoft Teams’ New Scheduled Chat Feature

Key Points in This Article

Microsoft Teams allows users to schedule the chat messages they compose up to seven days in the future.
Scheduled chat messages can be edited or deleted before sending as necessary.
This feature, available for 1:1 Teams Chat conversations, can help users communicate more effectively in several ways.

Have you ever found yourself struck with a brilliant idea after hours? Really late after hours? Are you perhaps the employee who’s become known for sending emails and chat requests at all hours of the night and on holidays that fully capture the idea you have lest you lose it? If you have developed that reputation, you may not be surprised to learn that your supervisor co-workers have begun to deprioritize your 1:00 am emails (or even ignore them entirely) due to fatigue, jealousy, resentment, or a mixture of all three.

Generally, it’s far better to send email and chat requests to your co-workers during regular working hours. To that end, email scheduling can be enormously beneficial. You can compose your thoughts and schedule your brilliant idea in your co-worker or supervisor’s Inbox at the right time. Major email clients, like Microsoft Outlook, offer users this feature. But to make communication even more effective, Microsoft has begun to offer users the ability to schedule Teams chats to be sent to other Teams users later.

How to Schedule a Teams Chat

You can use the Teams scheduled send feature on your desktop and mobile devices. This feature is available to everyone out of the box and is not one that can be disabled. Scheduled send-for chats work when chatting with other Teams users of Microsoft/Office 365. Also, as with regular messages, you can add images inline and files as attachments with your scheduled chat messages. However, this feature will not work when chatting with users of other services like Skype. It also does not work for Teams channels.

But if you want to schedule a chat with another Teams user on your desktop, simply compose a chat message as you usually would. When finished, you need to right-click the Send button. When you do, you’ll see a dialog box appear with scheduling options up to seven days from now. Choose the date and time that works for you, then click Send at scheduled time. Your chat message will then be sent to your intended recipient at the chosen date and time.

If you’re using a mobile device, you’ll need to continuously hold the send button down for a few seconds instead of right-clicking. You’ll then see a screen that allows you to pick the date and time you’d like and a Send at scheduled time button for you to select once you do.

Before your message is sent, you’ll see it listed in your Chat window marked with the day and time you’ve scheduled it for. Once sent, the scheduling information will vanish, and the now-sent chat message will appear as other active chat messages do. However, perceptive co-workers may be able to figure out that you’re using this feature. Teams only allow you to schedule your message for sending at half-hour intervals. Most people don’t start chatting on the dot at 10:00 am or 1:30 pm. But this nuance should not matter that much.

You should also note that scheduled chat messages cannot be marked as urgent or essential. Inherently, it would not make much sense to compose a critical or urgent message and then schedule it to send some time in the future. Moreover, Teams sends automatic notifications to recipients of important or urgent messages to get their attention – another reason why categorizing a scheduled chat in such a manner is not permitted. And if you type a chat message, mark it as important or urgent, and then use the scheduled send feature, Teams will automatically strip the essential or urgent categorization from your message.

You can also cancel or reschedule a scheduled chat message. To do the former, simply right-click the message, then select Cancel scheduled time on the resulting dialog box. And to reschedule, also right-click the message, pick a new date and time in the wrestling dialog box, and select Send at scheduled time.

The Benefits of Scheduling Chats

The benefits of scheduling chats are similar to those of scheduling emails. In addition to shedding your reputation as a workaholic with no work-life balance, you can avoid earning the ire of your colleagues who find non-emergency after-hours work-related emails and chats irritating – to say the least.

Suppose you’re a supervisor who finds themselves sending every work idea you have to your subordinates whenever they occur. In that case, you could easily see the morale of your department or unit plummet and even lose talented employees. But by scheduling these messages during office hours, you’ll show respect for your co-workers and help them enjoy the work-life balance that will help keep them engaged and productive.

Moreover, by scheduling your chats at the right time, you’re more likely to capture the attention of a co-worker, supervisor, or key decision-maker in the office. Many people pore through their emails after their first cup of coffee in the morning, while others do so mid-morning or at the end of the day. Knowing when your intended audience will most likely be receptive is key to effective communication. And if your intended recipient travels or resides overseas, scheduling a chat that matches their time zone can help you capture their attention.

Scheduling chats can also serve as a check on what you plan to send. When you come back to and reread a message that’s sitting in your chat pane, you may realize it’s not the best idea to send it or that there may be a more effective way to get your idea or point across. This feature may save you from impulsively sending a not-quite-fully-baked idea to management or sending a petty complaint to someone in writing. It may seem like an overstatement, but there’s a chance that a scheduled send for chat may save us from inadvertent professional harm.

November 3, 2022

Ontario’s Employee Monitoring Policy: What You Need To Know

Key Points

As of October 11, 2022, all employers in Ontario with 25 or more employees must have an electronic monitoring policy.
Electronic monitoring can include surveillance devices, GPS tracking, and keylogging software.
The electronic monitoring policy must state whether or not employees are being monitored.
Employers who fail to post a policy or do not provide employees with their electronic monitoring rights are subject to fines.

As of October 11, 2022, all employers in Ontario with 25 or more employees must have an electronic monitoring policy.

Electronic monitoring is nothing new, but a new law was recently passed in Ontario. As of October 11, 2022, all employers in Ontario with 25 or more employees must notify their employees in writing if they will be subject to electronic monitoring.

According to the provincial government, employers must notify employees of how they will be electronically monitored and where – including the devices, they may use to collect information. This law does not just apply to employees who work from home – it applies to anyone in Ontario who is subject to electronic monitoring, no matter where they are located.

Here’s what you need to know about electronic monitoring in the workplace and how you can prepare for it.

What Is Electronic Monitoring?

Electronic monitoring is the use of technology to track employees’ working hours. This can include recording the time they start and end work and any breaks they take throughout the day.

Many employers are now using electronic monitoring to ensure that their employees adhere to employee attendance and overtime policies.

Transparency is critical when it comes to electronic monitoring. While the law does not prohibit employers from monitoring their employees’ activity online, it does require that they be upfront about their use of electronic monitoring tools.

What Must the Electronic Monitoring Policy Include?

The electronic monitoring policy must consist of the following:

A statement that employees may be subject to electronic monitoring
A description of the types of electronic monitoring that may be used
Details about how electronic monitoring data will be used
The date the policy was created
The date any modifications to the policy were made

How Should Electronic Monitoring Policies Be Communicated?

The written policy that outlines these details should be provided to all employees within 30 days of October 11, 2022.
New employees should receive this policy within 30 days of starting their job.
After modifications are made, employees should receive the updated copy within 30 days.
Employees should receive the policy in paper or digital format, allowing them to print it out.

The policy can be a standalone document, or it can be included in an employee handbook. Regardless of how the policy is communicated, employees need to understand the policy and their rights regarding electronic monitoring in the workplace.

When Should the Electronic Monitoring Policy Be Instituted?

As mentioned, the electronic monitoring policy must be provided to employees within 30 days of October 11, 2022. Therefore, employers must provide employees with a written copy of the policy by November 10, 2022.

Starting in 2023, any employer with 25 or more employees at the beginning of each year must have an electronic monitoring policy by March 1 of that same year.

Which Employees Should Be Counted When Measuring the 25-Employee Threshold?

When employers are determining whether they need to communicate an electronic monitoring policy to employees, they must consider all employees working at a single location or facility, including the following:

Employees who are working from home
Probationary employees
Employees on leave or extended absences
Some trainees
Contract workers
Employees who are currently laid off and could return to the workplace

Employees partnering with temporary help agencies are employees of the agency. Therefore, temporary help agencies must legally communicate an electronic monitoring policy to their employees. This means employers who hire workers from temporary help agencies do not need to include these workers in the 25-employee threshold calculation.

How Do You Count Employees if There Are Multiple Locations?

If an employer has multiple locations, the total number of employees should be determined by adding all the employees working at a single location or facility.

For example, if an employer has three offices, each with 10 employees, the total number of employees for this particular employer would be 30. As long as this employer meets the 25-employee threshold, they must communicate the electronic monitoring policy to employees.

Overall, employers in Ontario must understand and follow the requirements around electronic monitoring in the workplace. By communicating an electronic monitoring policy to employees and ensuring they understand their rights, employers can help ensure a positive and productive work environment.

What Happens if an Employer Fails to Comply With the Requirements?

If an employer fails to communicate the electronic monitoring policy, they may be subject to fines and other legal penalties. The fine for the first contravention is $250, multiplied by the total number of employees affected by your failure to comply.

To avoid these fines and other legal issues, it is essential for employers to stay up-to-date on all workplace guidelines and requirements. With clear communication, transparency, and accountability, employers can create a positive work environment for employees and help their businesses run smoothly.

Wrapping Up

The digital age has changed the way we do things, both at work and at home. For example, more workplaces are turning to electronic tracking of their employees’ activities. Electronic monitoring of employees can benefit both the employer and employee, but only if both parties are aware of their rights and obligations.

Electronic monitoring can serve several purposes, including ensuring that employees complete their work on time, tracking productivity levels, and improving safety in the workplace. However, there are also some important legal considerations to be aware of when it comes to electronic monitoring. While employees will be limited on complaints, employers may want to seek legal counsel if they are unsure whether the electronic monitoring policy could create any entitlements outside of the Ontario Employment Standards Act.

As the days and weeks go by, electronic monitoring will continue to play an important role in the workplace, so it is essential for employers and employees alike to stay informed and comply with all workplace guidelines and requirements.

November 2, 2022

How Microsoft Teams’ Co-Organizer Feature Can Help Your Meetings Run Smoothly

Key Points in This Article:

Microsoft Teams lets Teams Meeting organizers assign the attendees they designate as co-organizers.
Co-organizers enjoy most of the privileges of organizers and can help organizers ensure that the meeting runs smoothly.
Assigning co-organizers is a straightforward process that can be performed before the meeting starts or even while running.

Videoconferences are more integrated into the daily operations of businesses and organizations than ever before. No longer are they the sole province of the clusters of tech-savvy employees in a department or business. They are widely used across industries, businesses, departments, and offices. As a result, videoconference scheduling and administration can no longer reside with a single employee or with the IT department. Employees should be able to schedule and administer meetings easily.

But when meetings are significant, mission-critical, customer-facing, or otherwise necessary, employees must be able to collaborate to ensure that they go off without a hitch. Microsoft Teams developers have made meeting administration collaboration easier with the introduction of the Microsoft Teams Co-Organizers feature.

How to Establish Co-Organizers In a Teams Meeting

Enabling this feature is pretty straightforward and starts with scheduling a Teams meeting. In your Outlook Calendar, right-click on the time and date you’d like to schedule, then select New Meeting Request from the resulting dropdown menu. You’ll be sent to a meeting invitation pane, where you can select the individuals you’d like to invite in either the Required or Optional fields. Begin to invite attendees. Make sure the individual or individuals you’d like to serve as co-organizers are added to the Required field.

Once you’ve added your attendees and sent your invitation, click on Teams Meeting in the Meeting ribbon at the top. You’ll then see Teams Options appear in the ribbon. Select it, and you’ll find in the dialog box that opens a field labeled Choose co-organizers. Here, you’ll enter the name(s) of the meeting attendee(s) you’d like to assign to this role, then click Save at the bottom of the dialog box.

If you didn’t assign a co-organizer before the meeting, don’t panic. If you realize you need someone to help, you can assign a co-organizer during the meeting. While the meeting is taking place, navigate to your Outlook Calendar in a separate tab. Open the Meeting, and if the person you’d like to make a co-organizer was not initially sent an invite, invite them now.

Once you have, or if they are already in the Teams Meeting as a Participant, select the More options icon (represented on your screen as three dots). Then select Meeting options from the dropdown menu that will appear. Here, you’ll simply add the name of your intended co-organizer or use the Search for participants function to find their name in a dropdown menu of attendees. Find the person, select them, and click Save. That person will find themselves with co-organizer privileges instantaneously.

What Co-Organizers Can Do

Co-organizers have most of the privileges you do as the organizer of your meeting. In fact, the list of what they can’t do is much shorter than what they can. Co-organizers can’t:

Take your organizer privileges from you
Handle the meeting recording function
Change meeting options while channel meetings are taking place
Access attendance reporting

But beyond these restrictions, they can do everything an organizer can, including managing breakout rooms and meeting options, changing attendee roles, admitting people from the lobby, locking the meeting, presenting content, and ending the meeting when it is over. With these privileges, your co-organizer can easily step in, in case you’re called out of your meeting to help manage an emerging crisis.

Two important notes. First, co-organizers are not automatically assigned the privilege of managing breakout rooms. They must also be assigned to the role of breakout room manager. To do so, you’ll need to select Breakout rooms in your Teams calendar meeting invite, then click Room settings. You’ll see an option to Assign presenters to manage rooms. Enable that option, then choose Search for presenters.

Here, you’ll be able to see a list of meeting attendees and assign your co-organizer as a breakout room manager. As with the co-organizer role, you can assign breakout room managers after the breakout rooms have been enabled. However, to ensure your meeting runs as smoothly as possible, it’s highly recommended you assign this role in advance.

Second, co-organizers cannot manage the recording function if the organizer has begun to record the meeting and then has to leave the meeting. This is because the recording file lives in the organizer’s OneDrive account, which the co-organizer would not have access to. However, if the organizer has not begun to record the meeting by the time they leave, the co-organizer may do so.

Why Adding a Co-Organizer Is Beneficial

When you add a co-organizer, they’ll have most of the privileges you do to administer the meeting. If you’re late or miss the meeting, your co-organizer can start, run, and end the meeting without delay. And making sure you always have a co-organizer when you schedule a meeting can be helpful in case an emergency forces you to step away mid-meeting or you run into technical difficulties administering a portion of it. Co-organizers can help ensure that your Teams Meetings flow smoothly with little to no interruption, no matter what curveballs you encounter.

Microsoft allows you to add up to 10 co-organizers per meeting. Now, this may seem unnecessary if you have never had more than ten members for the Teams Meetings you’ve administered. But Teams allows you to hold a meeting in which up to 1,000 people can participate. Moreover, using the View-only option allows you to administer a Teams Meeting in which up to 20,000 people can listen in. With attendance numbers like that, having up to 10 co-organizers makes a lot more sense.

Even if you’re not holding a meeting that size, some Teams Meetings have many moving parts. Microsoft Teams has been used to schedule meetings that span geographies and time zones and include multiple presentations, group exercises in breakout rooms, polls, and other activities. When meeting logistics are particularly complex, it’s a good idea to assign co-organizers and delegate them the responsibility of handling different parts of the meeting. Doing so can help ensure that the meeting goes smoothly and that there are people who can quickly step in to help manage the meeting if things take an unexpected turn.

Contact link

October 24, 2022

The Need For an Evolution in Fraud Prevention

Pig Butchering & Crypto Scams: The Need For an Evolution in Fraud Prevention

Key Points

As technology advances and the world becomes more connected, scams and fraud are getting more challenging to prevent.
Many experts are calling for a new approach to fraud and protecting consumers’ privacy.
Pig butchering and other crypto scams are just examples of the complex and sophisticated fraud businesses need to be aware of.

Recently, we’ve seen a dramatic increase in the sophistication of fraudsters and their methods. No longer are we solely dealing with simple phishing emails or low-tech scams. Today, fraudsters use cutting-edge technology and social engineering techniques to dupe victims from their hard-earned money.

Crypto scams are becoming more and more common. They’re so common that the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has issued warnings about them. It’s not just the SEC that’s concerned; law enforcement agencies also warn people about crypto scams. These scams could be anything from promising huge investment returns to pretending to be from a legitimate cryptocurrency exchange.

One of the most recent warnings comes from the Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3), a partnership between the FBI, the National White Collar Crime Center, and the Bureau of Justice Assistance. In early October, the IC3 recently published a report warning everyone about “pig butchering.”

What Is Pig Butchering?

“Pig butchering” crypto scams entail a complex combination of high-tech social engineering techniques and sophisticated technology to trick people into sending cryptocurrency to attackers. These scams use various methods, such as gaining victims’ trust through email or social media. Once the victim is emotionally and financially invested in the relationship, they are defrauded by having their money stolen or investment manipulated.

To protect against pig butchering scams, businesses and individuals should be vigilant about potential red flags such as financial requests or emotional manipulation and always conduct due diligence on any investment platform before committing any money. Additionally, businesses should take steps such as implementing transaction monitoring and multi-factor authentication to help better protect themselves and their customers from fraud.

By being aware of the latest trends in fraud and taking proactive measures to prevent it, we can help reduce the risk of becoming a victim of pig butchering scams. “Pig butchering” may seem like an odd term, but it’s quite fitting when you think about it; these types of scams are designed to butcher your business’s finances!

Why Evolution in Fraud Prevention Is Necessary

Thanks to advances in technology and the ever-increasing interconnectedness of our world, fraudsters have become more efficient than ever. The rise of cryptocurrencies, in particular, has created a new frontier for scammers to exploit the uninformed.

By embracing new technologies, such as artificial intelligence and machine learning, we can better understand the patterns and trends of scams. This will allow us to detect and thwart even the most sophisticated fraud attempts, protecting consumers from harm and restoring faith in our financial institutions.

We are undoubtedly facing a new era of fraud, one where the threat is more powerful and pervasive than ever before. With the right tools and strategies in place, we can evolve our fraud prevention methods and keep up with the ever-changing tactics that scammers use.

What Role Do Financial Institutions Play in the Evolving Fraud Landscape?

Consumers need to be aware of the latest crypto scams and take steps to protect themselves. Financial institutions also play a crucial role in preventing fraud. Financial institutions that fail to properly vet their customers and implement proper security measures can leave themselves vulnerable to pig butchering scams, which could result in substantial financial losses.

As digital transformation continues to take hold, the need for innovation in fraud prevention is more significant than ever. This is especially true for financial institutions that want to ensure the safety and security of their customers. As more financial institutions use SaaS(Software as a service) platforms to help reach a broader customer base and improve their processes, an effective fraud prevention strategy becomes even more critical.

Financial institutions unable to counter fraudsters’ advanced and sophisticated techniques will find themselves at a significant disadvantage. By leveraging the latest technology and working closely with their partners, financial institutions can better protect themselves and their customers while keeping pace with the rapidly evolving digital landscape.

What Actions Can Help Prevent Pig Butchering Scams?

So, what can be done to prevent these types of scams? Unfortunately, there is no one-size-fits-all solution. However, some steps businesses can take to help protect themselves and their customers from crypto scams and other types of fraud.

Educate Your Employees

One of the best ways to prevent crypto scams is to educate your employees about them. Make sure your employees know what crypto scams are and how they work. Show them examples of crypto scams so they can be on the lookout for them. Most importantly, remind them never to send cryptocurrency to anyone they don’t know or trust.

Know Your Customer

Another critical step businesses can take to prevent fraud is knowing their customers. Make sure you have proper KYC (Know Your Customer) procedures in place so you can verify the identity of your customers before doing business with them.

Use Multi-Factor Authentication

Multi-factor authentication (MFA) is an essential tool that can help prevent crypto scams and other types of fraud. With MFA, a user must provide two or more pieces of evidence (or “factors”) to access an account or system. For example, one factor could be something the user knows (like a password), while another could be something the user has (like a smartphone). By using MFA, businesses can make it much harder for fraudsters to access accounts or systems.

Implement Transaction Monitoring

Transaction monitoring is another critical tool businesses can use to prevent fraud. With transaction monitoring, businesses can set up rules and thresholds to flag suspicious activity. For example, if a customer suddenly starts making large withdrawals from their account, that could be flagged as suspicious activity, and further investigation may be needed. Transaction monitoring can help businesses catch fraudulent activity before it happens. “Pig butchering” is just one type of fraudulent activity that transaction monitoring can help detect; there are many others as well!

Final Thoughts

With the rise of sophisticated fraudsters and their methods, it’s become more critical for businesses to evolve their approach to fraud prevention. Traditional methods are no longer enough; businesses need to take a holistic approach that considers the latest trends and techniques used by fraudsters. “Pig butchering” crypto scams are just one example of sophisticated fraud perpetrated today. Still, by educating employees and implementing strong anti-fraud measures, businesses can help protect themselves and their customers from falling victim to these scams.

October 24, 2022

New York State Provides Great Example on How to Improve Organizational Cybersecurity

New York State Provides Great Example of How to Improve Organizational Cybersecurity

Key Points

The state of New York has introduced multiple pieces of legislation to help bolster private-sector cybersecurity.
It is recommended that all businesses consistently monitor for threats, educate their workforce on them, enforce strict policies regarding data transfer, bring your own device (BYOD), VPN usage, and other hallmarks of good cybersecurity.
Good cyber hygiene requires energy, effort, and buy-in from all members of your organization – but it’s worth it, as the impact of faulty cybersecurity practices can be catastrophic.

As the need for a secure cybersecurity posture continues to grow in importance for businesses everywhere, the state of New York has become a national leader in cybersecurity. That’s a good thing for New York businesses, as it can inspire confidence in them to operate successfully and securely. It also means those same businesses must comply with existing state regulations while maintaining a high standard for cyber hygiene within their organization. This enhances your organization’s security but isn’t necessarily easy to implement. With a little forethought and guidance, however, businesses can better understand what’s needed to make secure and informed decisions about their organization’s cybersecurity.

In this post, we’ll take a closer look at the groundwork New York state has laid regarding cybersecurity and what your New York business should focus on to ensure compliance and optimize data security.

New York Has Taken Multiple Measures to Show How Seriously It Takes Cybersecurity

The state holds one of the biggest cities in the world – one of the most influential municipalities for businesses. Because of this, it should be no surprise that the Empire State takes cybersecurity seriously. Its legislators have come up with multiple efforts to improve cybersecurity at the organizational level.

Several years ago, the New York State Department of Financial Services approved a first-in-the-nation cybersecurity regulation for banks, insurance companies, and other financial services institutions. The Department’s regulation requires organizations to adopt security policies and procedures to protect their information systems and nonpublic information.

Other cyber policy measures enacted statewide reach beyond the financial services sector. In 2018, the New York State Office of Information Technology Services unveiled its New York State Cyber Security Strategy & Policy Framework, which guides the implementation of cybersecurity best practices throughout all agencies within the Executive Branch of New York State.

The measure calls for agencies to do the following:

Develop risk assessment frameworks
Identify and assess the risks to their organization’s information systems
Implement controls designed to ensure adherence to organizational policies and procedures
Train employees on cybersecurity best practices
Implement BYOD policies
Use VPNs when connecting remotely
Integrate multifactor authentication for sensitive applications and systems
Educate staff members on phishing scams and other social engineering techniques
Create incident response plans to limit damage in case of a breach

To comply with this regulation, agencies should develop a written cybersecurity policy that includes the following:

Purpose and scope statements
Roles and responsibilities
Management commitment
Awareness training requirements (e.g., policies/procedures, roles/responsibilities)

There’s a good reason the state of New York believes in these recommendations – they don’t eliminate cybersecurity risks, but they can help you mitigate them. Of course, enacting these measures is easier said than done. Many teams struggle with cybersecurity even though everyone should view it as an organizational imperative. While this was aimed at the Executive Branch, it’s good advice for private sector organizations.

What Can Your New York Business Do to Practice Good Cyber Hygiene?

The first step New York state recommends is for you to develop your cybersecurity plan. Implementing a comprehensive cybersecurity plan is one of the most innovative things an organization can do to secure itself from malicious actors. Cybersecurity demands that your organization take it seriously, from senior leadership to employees in all departments and roles. A comprehensive plan for which all members of your staff are accountable builds a solid data security foundation.

Cybersecurity also requires vigilance. It requires an ongoing commitment by organizations to keep up with the rapidly changing technology landscape through continuous training, software updates, hardware upgrades, and more. Ensuring your IT department is responsible for implementing these – but that all members of your organization share in that responsibility to ensure the updates are happening – is paramount.

To successfully maintain proper cybersecurity, you need to clearly understand the threats that exist today and may arise in the future. You also need to understand what data is valuable for your organization, who can access it, where it is stored, and how often does it change?

Another essential component of a comprehensive cybersecurity plan is conducting regular assessments. This enables you to identify vulnerabilities in your systems and implement solutions before hackers exploit them. It also helps reduce the risk of data breaches, which can be costly for an organization financially and reputationally.

Cybersecurity is not a one-time undertaking but rather something that needs constant attention and updating as you discover new threats or witness existing ones as they evolve. Don’t view your cybersecurity plan or efforts as a “set it and forget it” feature of your business. Your cybersecurity plan should be a living document that adapts as needed.

Organizational Flexibility and Awareness are the Hallmarks of a Solid Cyber Posture

The truth is that the protective steps suggested by the state of New York are valid in any state. Cybersecurity should be one of your top concerns for a New York business or a business residing anywhere in the world.

The risks associated with cyber threats continue to grow as the technology landscape evolves rapidly, making it increasingly important for organizations to ensure they are implementing effective measures to protect their business operations and confidentially. Organizations need to continuously train employees on best practices related to cybersecurity while investing in software updates, hardware upgrades, firewalls, and other protective measures and hiring staff experienced with protecting against various types of threats (e.g., phishing).

The world is changing, and so are the threats that organizations face. The cybersecurity space is constantly evolving, so your organization needs to be vigilant about keeping up with the latest trends and developments. Keep cybersecurity at the top of mind for everyone throughout the organization to limit vulnerabilities and keep your systems more secure. Contact us today for more on how we can help you do this.

October 24, 2022

What Your Business Needs to Know About Protecting Customer Data

What Your Business Needs to Know About Protecting Customer Data

Key Points:

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) sets standards for safeguarding customer information.
The Safeguards Rule took effect in 2003 but was amended in 2021 after public comment to ensure the rule keeps pace with the current technology.
The revised rule offers in-depth guidance for businesses — reflecting the core data security principles that all organizations under FTC’s jurisdiction must implement.
The FTC Safeguards Rule applies to a specific class of financial institutions, such as mortgage companies, creditors, mortgage brokers, and debt collectors.
The safeguard rules don’t apply to banks, federal credit unions, and loans and savings institutions.

Financial institutions under the jurisdiction of the FTC Safeguards Rule must implement new security controls to protect customer’s financial information. The rule took effect in 2003 but was amended in 2021 after public comment to ensure the rule keeps pace with current technology.

After revision, FTC imposed a deadline of December 9, 2022, with a penalty of $45,000 for violating the rule. The regulations may be news for non-banking financial institutions that are first-time subject to the FTC Safeguards Rule.

FTC Safeguards Rule At Its Core

The FTC Safeguards Rule outlines data security guidelines for financial institutions under its jurisdiction to protect customers’ information and ensure organizations keep pace with current technology.

The rule is part of the more significant 1999 Financial Modernization Act, which first required financial institutions to document how they handle sensitive customer information. After almost two decades, it’s safe to say the technology and data security rules have become ancient.

Following public comment, the FTC updated the Safeguard Rule in 2021 to offer better guidance for organizations. The affected financial organizations have to go over the updates of the FTC Safeguards Rule to ensure they remain compliant with the outlined expectation before the December 9, 2022, deadline.

Who Must Comply with The FTC Safeguards Rule

According to FTC, the rule applies to all financial institutions under FTC’s jurisdiction. The official FTC site defines a financial institution as any organization that engages in activities that are financial in nature or are incidental to such financial activities.

Some financial institutions that FTC gives as examples include:

Mortgage companies
Mortgage brokers
Creditors
Debt collectors
Retailers that issue store credit cards
Property appraisers
Career counselors who work with clients in the finance industry
Automobile dealership
Businesses that print and sell checks to customers
Organizations that regularly wire money to and from consumers
Check cashing businesses
Accountants and income tax return preparers
Investment advisory company and credit counseling service
Colleges and universities accepting Title IV funds

The FTC safeguards rule doesn’t apply to banks, federal credit unions, and savings and loan institutions.

What The FTC Safeguards Rule Require Organization to Do

FTC Safeguards requires organizations under its jurisdiction to comply with several requirements. The regulator outlines three elements for every information security program of financial institutions. Your security program must:

Ensure the security and confidentiality of customer data
Protect customer data against threats and hazards
Prevent unauthorized access

The FTC Safeguards Rule outlines nine requirements for compliant security infrastructure. For an organization to be compliant, it must:

Assign a qualified individual to implement and supervise your organization’s information security program.
Execute a risk assessment to identify any vulnerability that can compromise the security and confidentiality of customer data.
Design and implement security controls to mitigate the risk identified through your risk assessment. The controls include access control, encrypting customer data in transit or at rest, implementing multifactor authentication, and secure data disposal.
Regularly monitor and test the efficacy of your security controls.
Train your staff to eliminate human weaknesses in your security programs.
Monitor your service providers to ensure they’re up to the task and meet your company’s security standards.
Keep your information security program current because the threat landscape is constantly evolving.
Create a written incident response plan.
Your qualified individual to report to your Board of Directors

What’s New With the FTC Safeguards Rule

The new amendments have many new requirements, including:

Policies
Reports
Documentation
Technical and training requirements

The technical requirements call for cybersecurity solutions that are FTC-compliant. Your organization needs to implement a security program with the following:

Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA): The new FTC Safeguards Rule requires your organization to implement multifactor authentication for any individual accessing any information in your system. Your security system should provide users with more than one piece of evidence to verify their identity. MFA makes it harder for unauthorized people to access customers’ sensitive data.

Penetration Testing and Vulnerability Assessments: FTC requires your security practices to include continuous monitoring, periodic penetration testing, and vulnerability assessments. The test checks for vulnerabilities in your system before hackers can exploit them. More importantly, the assessments test your cyber-defense capability and responsiveness.

Monitor and Log User Activity & Access: Another requirement you must meet is implementing policies, controls, and procedures to monitor and log the activity of authorized users. Your organization should be able to detect unauthorized access to prevent the wrong use or tampering of customers’ data.

Encryption: The Amended Rule requires your information security system to encrypt all customer data at rest and in transit. While data encryption is operationally difficult and costly, FTC has noted several low-cost and free encryption solutions for data in transit.

What is Monitoring & Activity Logging for FTC Safeguards Rule?

FTC says that you must implement a security solution that monitors when authorized users are accessing customer information on your system and detects any unauthorized or suspicious access to customer data.

One way to implement the requirement is to adopt a solution that collects, centralizes, and automatically analyzes your log data for users’ activities. The solution should detect unauthorized access, alert you in real-time, provide the next steps to respond, and allow easy access to historical log reports of user activity for investigations and audits.

The FTC Safeguards Mean Well For Your Business

Financial institutions under FTC should get into compliance the quickest way possible. While the new FTC Safeguards Rule demands a lot from your organization to be compliant, it’s for a good reason. The spike in security threats is concerning, and for every stakeholder in your organization, you need to do your part in managing risks.

October 18, 2022

All You Need to Know About Azure AD

Key Points

What is Azure AD?
What are the outstanding features of Azure AD?
Who uses Azure AD?
How does one set up a backup Azure AD connect server?
What are Azure AD licenses?

Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) is a cloud-based identity and access management service that provides a single, centralized access point for managing user identities and permits access to Azure resources. Azure AD also offers a rich set of features that can be used to secure and manage access to on-site and cloud-based resources.

This Azure AD facilitates access to your team’s Microsoft 365, the Azure portal, and thousands of additional SaaS applications. In addition, Azure AD can grant entry to protected internal resources, such as your company’s intranet or its own cloud-hosted apps and services.

The Outstanding Features of Azure AD

Azure Active Directory provides a robust set of features that can be used to secure access to resources, including:

Multi-factor authentication: Azure Active Directory supports multi-factor authentication, which adds an additional layer of security by requiring users to provide more than one form of identification when logging in.
Conditional access: Conditional access allows administrators to set conditions that must be met before a user can access a resource.
Identity protection: Identity protection is a feature of Azure Active Directory that uses machine learning to detect suspicious activity and protect user identities.
Azure information protection: This service helps organizations protect their data from unauthorized access.

Azure AD is a valuable tool for organizations of all sizes that want to secure access to their resources. It provides a central point of control for managing access to resources, and its rich set of features helps organizations manage access to both on-premises and cloud-based resources.

Who Uses Azure AD?

Azure AD is used by organizations that want to securely store and manage their user identities in the cloud. This includes organizations that want to use Azure AD to manage on-premises resources, such as Active Directory Domain Services (AD DS) or Azure AD Domain Services. Azure AD can be used by the following categories of individuals:

IT Admins

Microsoft Azure Active Directory allows you to control user access to your apps and the data they need. With Azure Active Directory, an additional form of identification may be necessary before gaining access to any sensitive information resources.

The user provisioning process between your on-premises Windows Server Active Directory and cloud apps like Microsoft 365 can be automated with the help of Azure AD. Furthermore, Azure AD offers powerful automated features to help protect user identities and credentials and meet government requirements.

App Developers

Developers can make their apps work with the user’s existing credentials by integrating Azure Active Directory as a standards-based SSO solution. Azure Active Directory also offers application programming interfaces (APIs) that may be used to build apps with a user experience tailored to an organization’s specific needs.

Microsoft 365, Office 365, Azure, or Dynamics CRM Online subscribers

A paid subscription is all one needs to use Azure AD. Everyone who registers for Microsoft 365, Office 365, Azure, or Dynamics CRM Online is also an Azure AD customer. You can begin managing who has access to your synchronized cloud apps.

How to Set up a Backup Azure AD Connect Server

If you have an on-premises Active Directory environment and want to use Azure AD as your identity provider, you must set up and configure Azure AD Connect.

When you install Azure AD Connect, you specify an Azure AD tenant. This is the Azure AD directory that Azure AD Connect synchronizes with. By default, Azure AD Connect installs a single Azure AD Connect server in the Azure AD tenant you specify. This server is called the primary Azure AD Connect server.

You can configure the standby Azure AD Connect server by using the Azure AD Connect wizard or by editing the Azure AD Connect configuration file.

Here are the steps to follow:

To configure a standby Azure AD Connect server, you will need to install Azure AD Connect on the standby server and then configure it to sync with Azure AD.
Once Azure AD Connect is installed, you need to configure it to sync with Azure AD. To do this, open the Azure AD Connect tool and click the “Configure” button.
On the “Configure Synchronization” page, select the “Customize synchronization options” option and click the “Next” button.
On the “Connect to Azure AD” page, enter the credentials for a global administrator account in Azure AD and click the “Next” button.
On the “Optional Features” page, select the “Azure AD Connect Health” option and click the “Install” button.
On the “Ready to Configure” page, click the “Configure” button.
On the “Configure synchronization options” page, select the “Synchronize All Domains” option and click the “Next” button.
On the “Outgoing synchronization” page, select the “Start the synchronization process
On the “Completion” page, click the “Exit” button.
The Azure AD Connect server is now configured as a standby server.

What Are Azure AD Licenses?

It is possible to upgrade your Azure Active Directory deployment by purchasing a Premium P1 or Premium P2 license. The premium licenses for Microsoft’s Azure Active Directory supplement your current open directory service. The licenses you’ve acquired will provide your mobile users with secure access, improved monitoring, and more thorough reporting on security.

Azure Active Directory Free

This license allows for single sign-on for services like Azure, Microsoft 365, and many SaaS alternatives; user and group management, directory synchronization between the cloud and on-premises; standard reporting; password resets for cloud users.

Azure Active Directory Premium P1

One of P1’s best features is its ability to provide hybrid users with access to both on-premises and cloud resources, expanding the use of the service beyond its free tier. By utilizing cloud write-back features and advanced administration tools like dynamic groups and self-service group management, in addition to Microsoft Identity Manager, your on-premises users can reset their own passwords.

Azure Active Directory Premium P2

In addition to the features found in the Free and P1 tiers, the P2 tier adds Privileged Identity Management, which allows you to find, restrict, and monitor administrators and their access to resources, and provide just-in-time access when it’s needed, as well as Azure Active Directory Identity Protection, which enables risk-based Conditional Access to your apps and critical company data.

“Pay as You Go” Feature Licenses

Azure Active Directory Business-to-Customer, among other optional features, can be licensed separately (B2C). Using business-to-consumer methods can help you offer identity and access control solutions for apps that end up being used by consumers.

In conclusion, Azure AD is a comprehensive identity and access management solution that provides single sign-on (SSO), role-based access control, and directory integration with on-premises Active Directory and other identity management systems. Azure AD provides a robust foundation for identity management in the cloud and helps organizations securely connect to Azure services and other cloud-based resources.

October 17, 2022

How Keeping Track of Microsoft’s Product Plans Can Keep Your Network Secure

How Keeping Track of Microsoft’s Product Plans Can Keep Your Network Secure

Key Points in This Article:

CIOs and IT administrators must ensure that their networks remain free and clear of outdated software applications, which can pose a tremendous security risk.
Outdated applications can provide a backdoor for ransomware attacks, malware, and viruses.
Performing regular network audits, keeping software up-to-date, and keeping abreast of planned software retirements can help businesses and organizations eliminate this source of risk.

An often overlooked yet crucial function of IT administrators across industries is to keep their corporate networks up-to-date. When businesses and organizations allow outdated software to languish on their servers, they not only waste valuable resources. They can expose their networks to vulnerabilities that hackers and cybercriminals can exploit. When a developer retires software, they no longer provide patches and updates, which then falls to IT departments to secure. Doing so usually falls to the bottom of the priority list and is often neglected entirely until an incident occurs.

Why You Need to Retire Outdated Software Applications

Not only can outdated software inadvertently create backdoors to your network, but the data contained in these applications is also quite vulnerable. You can quickly lose sensitive employee, financial, or client information you forgot was stored in outdated software. And soon enough, you may lose customers, employees, and revenue while potentially facing legal or regulatory action due to negligence.

These systems also increase your network’s overall vulnerability to a ransomware attack. These attacks can be devastating, particularly for small businesses and those with underresourced IT departments. Even a moderately sophisticated ransomware attack that encrypts a few key systems can be enough to put a company out of business.

And the perpetrators of these attacks spare no business or industry. Cybercriminals have targeted corporations and companies of all sizes, government agencies, schools, hospitals, and many other entities in the past decade. Cybercriminals seek vulnerabilities they can exploit to access networks from which they believe they can extract payment. Often, the amount of the payment isn’t what threatens a business’ operation as a going concern, but the consequences of an attack, including:

Operational downtime and resulting lost revenue
Reputational damage resulting in a loss of customers and revenue
Loss of proprietary data, trade secrets, and competitive advantage
IT hardware/software damages and replacement costs
Litigation expenses stemming from potential post-incident legal or regulatory action

Even businesses and organizations with a cyber incident response plan on paper will find that an actual attack often unfolds quite differently than it does in scenario planning sessions. There’s invariably a scenario you did not account for, a new staffer who isn’t up to speed on the plan when the attack occurs, or a failing backup system that no one identified. And while you may be quick to respond and mitigate the damage, you won’t always be lucky.

It’s a better strategy to fortify your network and continuously assess it for weaknesses and vulnerabilities. But you don’t need to do a risk assessment to know that retired software should no longer be on your servers. Schedule one now if you haven’t performed a network audit in a while (at least six months). A network audit involves more than just ensuring your software applications are up-to-date. However, using the network audit process and methodology is good practice. During the audit, take the time to:

Review and record the software applications running on your network within the context of network security, performance, and inventory.
Assess how applications are used and how you can update outdated programs without compromising continuous operations.
Ensure older software applications have the latest patches installed.

You’ll also want to develop a plan to retire outdated software applications. Doing so lies outside the scope of a network audit and requires more than just a network auditing tool. You’ll want to reach out to end users still using these programs and determine how best to replace them without data loss, operational disruption, or internal disputes.

But regardless of your budgetary constraints and organizational culture (or dysfunction), you must get outdated software off your network. It poses a liability that, if properly exploited, could spell the end of your business or organization.

Planning to Retire Older Software Applications

If you haven’t performed a network audit in a while and brought your applications up-to-date, you may find the process a bit overwhelming. To avoid the extra stress and work involved in clearing backlogs of outdated applications from your network, plan to phase out applications that their developers are retiring.

Major software developers like Microsoft announce their plans to retire applications years in advance to give users across the globe the time they need to transition to new systems. By keeping an eye on these announcements, you can create a plan to phase them out over time. That way, you can give your co-workers time to adjust to the new system or system update while ensuring your network is as safe as possible from threats.

Microsoft announced plans to retire three products in 2023: Microsoft Azure Virtual Machine (classic), Kaizala, and Scheduler for Microsoft 365. Over half a dozen products will no longer be serviced, including Windows 10 Enterprise and Education, Microsoft Endpoint Configuration Manager, Version 2107, and Windows 11 Home and Pro. Further, dozens of products will no longer receive support, and it’s only a matter of time before they are retired entirely.

Some products will be placed on Extended Support, which will allow users more time to transition from them to more modern versions or alternate products. During the Extended Support phase, these applications will not undergo any panned or requested design changes and will likely be retired in the future.

Microsoft’s blog has a complete list of products slated for retirement, End of Service, End of Support, or Extended Support in 2023. Microsoft strives to make these transitions as easy as possible for corporate and individual customers. So they’ve outlined not only upcoming product retirements and phase-out plans for 2023 but also 2024, 2025, 2026, and 2027.

If you look at the list for 2027, it’s not nearly as robust as that for 2023. But over time, Microsoft will continuously update the blog with its product plans. It’s a good idea to bookmark this blog and sign up for updates so you have the necessary information to revise your own organizational IT plans accordingly. By doing so, you’ll be able to ensure your network’s resources are always up-to-date and keep it as free from potential vulnerabilities as possible.

October 14, 2022

How Granting Local Admin Privileges Could Cost You Your Business

Key Points in This Article

Historically, many overburdened IT departments have sought to save time and work by granting multiple users across their business or organization local administrative privileges.
Doing so substantially increases the risk that their network security may be compromised.
The costs of a data breach are far higher than the productivity savings that may be achieved by granting such privileges.

These days, organizational cybersecurity should be top-of-mind for any cybersecurity professional. Whether cybersecurity is in your title or you’re a generalist handling everything from network maintenance to changing printer ink cartridges, it’s always critical that you keep an eye out for how our organization’s operations may inadvertently be creating vulnerabilities third parties can exploit.

When cybersecurity professionals conduct risk assessments, they often find vulnerabilities stemming from organizational practices that are pretty common across industries. One such practice is granting local administrative rights to individual users, most often in small businesses, organizations, and those with understaffed IT departments.

The Dangers of Granting Local Admin Privileges

If you’ve worked for an understaffed IT department, you’ve likely spent much of your day handling mundane helpdesk requests. None of them take that much time, but there are a lot of them, and they don’t stop. You cannot devote adequate – sometimes any – time to the IT aspects of the organization’s revenue-diving activities or essential network maintenance and security because there are so many requests.

In this scenario, perhaps you, like many IT administrators, realized many of these requests could be handled by individual users simply by giving them administrative privileges. You may have saved some time on routine tasks, like adding applications, users, and hardware. And you may have found yourself breathing a sigh of relief given that you’ve now reduced the number of requests across your desk.

But doing so is a mistake. When you provide local admin rights to users across your organization, you’ve inadvertently made it more vulnerable to intrusion. And the extra work you’ll perform to address a data breach compared to the few minutes you may save installing a printer here, or there is certainly not worth it.

Users frequently try to install software programs they find online. When they do and lack local admin privileges, they’re prompted to ask permission to download the software in question. This prompt allows IT administrators to vet the software and ensure it does not present a threat. But when users have local admin privileges, they have the freedom to download applications as they see fit. And they may even disable network security measures that vet new applications for the presence of malware and viruses to expedite installation.

In doing so, they’ve exposed your organization’s network to risk. Malware and viruses lurk in seemingly harmless downloads found on official-looking websites. Not only can they compromise your user’s account and device. If downloaded on an account with local admin privileges, they can compromise your entire network’s security. Malware on such an account could disable your organization’s antivirus protections, turn off your firewall, and hijack your data on multiple devices.

Local admin privileges allow users to override the Group Policy you’ve established. If a hacker gains control of an account with these privileges, they could prevent your Group Policy from being accessed or create their own. In either case, your security protocols would be compromised, giving a criminal the ability to access and steal your data, encrypt your system and hold it for ransom, and conduct other activities that could be financially catastrophic for your company.

Many cybercriminals specifically seek administrative credentials to penetrate corporate networks. Fundamentally, the smaller the number of accounts with administrative credentials, the less risk one of these accounts will be compromised. In practice, users who have been granted these credentials outside of the IT department, by and large, have had minimal, if any, cybersecurity awareness training or have not followed best practices to safeguard their accounts. Accordingly, cybercriminals have found their way into these accounts easily and have been able to cause considerable damage.

Why Local Admin Privileges Must Be Restricted

Even if your IT department remains small and understaffed, granting users across your organization local admin privileges is no longer justifiable. Any time you save will be more than offset by the damage that can be caused in the event of a breach.

As an IT professional, you will face countless hours over the following days, weeks, and months scrambling to address the threat, regain control of compromised systems, and ensure your employer can remain operational. Your business might face reputational damage and legal consequences if client data is compromised. And depending on your industry, you may face regulatory action if the breach occurred because you failed to meet legally mandated cybersecurity standards.

The cumulative financial consequences of a breach can be catastrophic. Some research asserts that as many as 75 percent of small and medium-sized businesses go under after a ransomware attack. And no industry or sector of the economy is safe. In May 2022, Lincoln University permanently closed its doors after a devastating ransomware attack.

Even if you don’t suffer a breach in the near term, granting users local admin privileges can create more work and headaches for IT. You may find that departments are now downloading and using software applications you’re not equipped to support. Or you may find that in attempting to manage relatively simple tasks themselves, they’ve inadvertently created more complicated problems for themselves – and other users. You may not be saving yourself nearly as much time as you think.

It’s also not uncommon for senior leaders to believe that they should be granted local admin privileges by virtue of their position. And when they have them, they may accidentally cause problems for themselves or other users that you must address. Or you may find them using their privileges to undermine organizational cybersecurity measures out of a misguided attempt to increase productivity or out of hubris.

The cybersecurity of your organization must supersede all of these considerations. To preserve it, you must tightly restrict administrative privileges across your organization and actively monitor the accounts that possess them. Moreover, you must educate all users about cybersecurity continuously and thoroughly. Doing so will help you keep your organization safe and help them understand their loss of these privileges is not about a lack of trust. In fact, when your co-workers make the connection between the proliferation of accounts with local admin privileges, data breaches, and their own jobs, they’re likely to accept the removal of these privileges without protest.