Coleman Technologies Blog

What is Social Engineering?

Think of it like this: online, you have some type of social currency. Your personal information, your data, your interactions, your profiles, they all add up to your online life. If someone were to use that information to trick you into providing them access to your secure online accounts, you would be the victim of a social engineering attack. 

Basically, a hacker uses what amounts to the fundamentals of human psychology to gain unauthorized access to an account. Rather than exploiting a vulnerability within a system’s technology, a social engineer will take advantage of the human resources to gain access through relatively simple psychology.

Successful social engineering can be the result of many different actions. Some include: carelessness by an individual, perceived kindness, reaction to fear, and business as usual. Let’s take a look at these actions and how social engineering schemes work as a result.

Individual Carelessness

When there is a lack of diligence carried out by an individual, there are openings for a social engineering attack. This includes trash thrown out with information on it, keeping login credentials out in the open, and other careless actions. It’s important that you and your staff understand that the best practices of password protection, such as using a password manager, are crucial to maintaining the integrity of your company’s network and infrastructure.

Perceived Kindness

Many people won’t think twice about helping someone that asks for help. Social engineering attackers take advantage of the better angels of our nature, by using people’s helpfulness to gain access to secure computing resources. Any person can fall for this type of attack. This is why we stress that in order to keep your digital and physical resources secure, a critical eye for potential intrusion works. That doesn’t mean you have to be a jerk, but if a situation is presented to you that’s out of the ordinary, take anyone’s helplessness with a grain of salt.

Business as Usual

When we picture a hacker, we all tend to think about them the same way. They are brooding people sitting in a dark room typing away at a computer. In social engineering attacks, this couldn’t be further from the truth. A popular social engineering tactic is to gain physical access to a large business--where there are often a lot of moving parts--and then spend time at the business looking for ways into secure digital environments. This could also include straight hatchet jobs, where your employees would help people outside of your business sabotage your access control systems. 

Reaction to Fear

Finally, fear is one of the best motivators. By striking fast and threatening all types of negative consequences if a worker doesn’t help them get into a secure computing system, this kind of cyberattack can be a major problem. 

Coleman Technologies Can Help Protect Your Business

If you are looking to secure your network from cyberattacks, including social engineering, the IT professionals at Coleman Technologies can help. Call us today at (604) 513-9428 to learn more about how we can help you with the training you need to keep social engineering from causing problems for you.

Depending on their needs, businesses might have a series of consumer-grade printers, or they may rely on a centralized network copier/printer. Regardless of how you go about using the printers at your business, ensuring they are managed centrally will help a business cut down on problems. 

You Can Manage and Control the Expenses Tied to Printing

Many businesses don’t manage their printers at all. As ink/toner prices continue to climb, this can produce major, pointless costs. That’s why some businesses have begun to push a paperless strategy, using digital means to store, search, share, and back up organizational files. This strategy, while coming with substantial costs, takes the guesswork out of the whole process.

Reducing the amount that your users print can really make a difference over time. In a recent industry survey conducted by Xerox, it was found that 64 percent of small businesses aren’t tracking their printer usage costs. The report also revealed that nearly half of companies believe that their employees were just printing out their emails. 

Printer Management is Worth Investing In

To avoid the waste that comes with this type of behavior, a small business can deploy tools used to control, report, on, and restrict printer usage. Since every business has different uses and requirements, using a permissions-based system allows for centralized management over your printers.

Additionally, by having a print management platform in place, those endpoints are patched, updated, and protected against threats. There have been many cases over the last couple years where cybercriminals have utilized office printers as an entry-point for spreading malware or breaching data. These types of exploits can cost your business a lot more than another ream of paper or toner cartridge.

Going Paperless May Be Right for You

For some organizations, it may be worth it to reduce your printing costs by going paperless. Going completely digital means that documents can be searched, copied, organized, and shared securely, and backed up without requiring paper, toner, or bulky filing cabinets. Today, even contracts can be shared and signed digitally without a single sheet of paper being used.

Would you like to learn more about paperless office solutions? Contact us today at (604) 513-9428.

For context, it helps to know that Microsoft OneDrive is a cloud storage platform that just about any business could make use of, regardless of its size. After all, any size of business will have to remain organized.

Speaking of which, our first tip covers how OneDrive can make this organization super convenient for you.

OneDrive Files On-Demand

Files On-Demand gives your users the ability to effectively link their File Explorer to OneDrive, which enables them to work with files found in your OneDrive without downloading all of them to their device. Not only does this save real estate in the device’s storage, it allows work to continue offline through a simple proactive switch in a particular file’s settings.

Known Folder Move

OneDrive can also work as a simple backup option, although it certainly should not replace a comprehensive plan. Regardless, Known Folder Move allows users to have the contents of certain folders automatically synchronize with their OneDrive storage. This can be set up during the initial installation of OneDrive, or at any time you have need for it.

Integration with Microsoft Outlook

Consider what typically happens when you try to share some kind of Office document as an email attachment for someone to work on: you aren’t sending them access to your file, you’re simply sending them their own copy. OneDrive fixes that by enabling a user to share their files as though they were attachments, editing the permissions provided on the fly. As a result, the actual file is being collaborated on, really allowing work to be done.

What has been your experience using OneDrive? Share your impressions, as well as any other questions we can help with, in the comments!

Promoting Assessment

The purpose of having an assessment done on your organization’s information systems is simple: to gain a more complete understanding of how your IT works in regards to your business. That’s not to say that having an understanding how everything fits will, in itself, make your business’ IT more effective. No, that’s on you, but in order to know that you need to change, eliminate, or reconfigure parts of your IT strategy, understanding what systems do what is essential. 

Moreover, the assessment gives decision makers a look at how inefficient their IT strategy is, and how to make the changes necessary to make those systems work better for the company. A thorough IT assessment will have several parts to it. Today, we are going to go through what to expect when you get an assessment; or, what you need to look at if you want to objectively assess your own business’ IT.

Two crucial metrics that will repeatedly make an appearance are your total cost of ownership, and your return on investment.

• Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) - This takes a look at the comprehensive cost of a given piece of business technology. Therefore, it goes beyond just the cost of procurement, and also considers how much the solution will cost to operate and maintain, as well as how much additional cost any downtime could create.
  
  
• Return on Investment (ROI) - This familiar metric measures your profit from a single investment, once all procurement and operating costs have been covered.

Let’s look how these metrics come into play during an IT assessment:

At the Start

Typically, if your organization is going to conduct an IT assessment, there is some reason for it, and the results of this assessment (or audit, if you prefer) will likely have more to do with your future investments than many other actions would. This fact dictates that the audit is carried out by IT professionals who have the training needed to recognize inconsistencies, irregularities, and most importantly inefficiencies. 

Action

Any good IT assessment will begin by putting together a comprehensive Asset Detail Report. This will tell you what IT resources you have, when they were implemented and serviced, the latest firmware and software license and much, much more. This will cover all of your IT, including printers, copiers, cloud-based platforms, computing and networking hardware, software, and more. 

Additionally, you might find it helpful (at this stage) to create something known as a site diagram  or network map. This visual guide is used to map out the flow of data through your business.

Analysis

The assessment team will next audit your network by performing a SWOT analysis (which analyzes your business network’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats). In this process it will become more clear what potential problems your network has and what it’s doing to function efficiently. There will be investment suggestions aimed to help reduce your organization’s IT risk, while also promoting solid TCO rates and improving your ROI.

Compilation

Finally, a risk report is assembled that combines the results from a variety of factors, including:

• Network hardware
• Security configuration
• Servers
• VPN/Remote Access
• Websites, domain names, and hosting provider
• ISP
• Phone System
• Email, messaging, and conferencing
• Computers, mobile devices, tablets
• Cabling
• Printers
• Software and mobile apps
• Procedures, policies
• Technology vendors

There are some other factors included in a finished assessment report. These include the status of domain controllers, the Active Directory settings, other potential vulnerabilities (like weak passwords and missing software updates), and any known network vulnerabilities.

Your finalized assessment will give you a comprehensive report that will be an indispensable tool for decision makers.

If you are looking for help identifying your company’s IT issues, call our knowledgeable technicians today at (604) 513-9428. 

Making Sense of Gamification

Many parents have historically used a gamification strategy to convince their young’uns to cooperate better with notoriously less-fun parts of daily life. Take clean-up time, for instance, which many parents will turn into a race between themselves and their children to see who can pick up quicker. Taking an unappealing task and adding game-like elements to motivate people to do it is the concept that forms the foundation of gamification.

This isn’t a new idea, either. Mark Twain knew what he was talking about when he wrote about Tom Sawyer tricking his friends into white-washing a fence for him. By making the activity seem elite and enjoyable, he hoaxed and hoodwinked his friends into completing his chore for him while they all enjoyed proving themselves capable. As was written at the end of that particular chapter:

“If he had been a great and wise philosopher, like the writer of this book, he would now have comprehended that Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do, and that Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do ... There are wealthy gentlemen in England who drive four-horse passenger-coaches twenty or thirty miles on a daily line, in the summer, because the privilege costs them considerable money; but if they were offered wages for the service, that would turn it into work and then they would resign.”

If the psychology behind this sounds silly to you, consider the concept of “employee of the month.”

Why Gamification is Effective

Human psychology is a big part of why gamification has been shown to be so impactful in motivating employees. As a species, human beings tend to be strongly motivated by certain desires, namely:

• Recognition - I want my efforts to be paid attention to.
• Competition - I want to win.
• Distinction - I want to be rewarded for my efforts.

While many tasks originally lack the potential for most, if not all, of these desires to be filled, gamification can inject this capability by fulfilling all three of these desires. If an employee were to have the satisfaction of knowing that they performed most admirably, gaining some perks and being looked upon with favor from the higher-ups, it only makes sense that they would continue to strive to that position from that point on. Furthermore, it also helps to motivate your other employees to strive harder, so they may have a chance of receiving the same benefits as well.

Don’t believe me? Just look at Google, where gamification has helped chop down travel expenses by allowing the person with the most budget left over after a business trip to keep the difference.

Adopting Gamification

If you’re now considering a more gamified approach to business-as-usual, you have a great variety of options available to you. Different use cases and different industry types each have their own options to do so, all with the potential to be a great investment.

You can also elect how much you want to put into gamification. Sure, there are solutions out there specifically to gamify common business processes, but you could also come up with your own homespun methods. Maybe an employee who visibly went above and beyond one day would receive an entry into an end-of-year drawing for a desirable prize. You really are only limited by your creativity - or how long you’re willing to spend searching online for ideas.

Just as though you’re the parent trying to convince your employees to pick up their playthings, the key to effective gamification is to turn a rote task into an engaging activity.

Have you ever tried out any gamification methods in your office? Which ones did you find most effective? Share what you did in the comments!