You Need to Be Careful About Where You Find Your Security Advice

It can be challenging to find reliable IT advice nowadays, particularly when it comes to cybersecurity. Between coworkers with the best intentions and the online influencers selling their guides and platforms, there’s a lot of advice out there. Unfortunately, a lot of it is outdated or incorrect.

This can be actively dangerous where your business’ security is concerned.

Let’s address some of the most common security myths we still encounter far too often.

Myth: “Hackers won’t bother with my business, it's too small.”

This misconception could be the thing that puts you out of business.

It’s easy to assume that a smaller business footprint will protect you from the attacks that modern cybercriminals will wage. After all, why would they bother attacking you when there are so many larger, richer companies to target?

Simple: you’re presumably going to be easier for an attacker to successfully breach as compared to those larger, richer, and presumably more prepared companies, and your data is just as valuable as theirs. Using automated software, millions of businesses are scanned for specific vulnerabilities, regardless of their size, and often, the smaller ones are the more desirable targets for attackers looking to get the most out of their schemes.

Myth: “All I have to do to anonymize myself is use Incognito Mode.”

This is only true if you’re talking about hiding your identity from the specific device you use.

It’s essential to recognize that computers are inherently interconnected devices. This means that the computer itself will save session information, but your ISP, employer, and every website you visit will all have access to the same information. Incognito mode, also known as Private Browsing, can be used to prevent your device from retaining browsing history, searches, or cookies.

Crucially, your device won’t retain this data. It is still accessible to your Internet service provider and the websites you’ve visited, and if you used a company network, your network admin can still see everything and track what you’ve been doing. This also means that Incognito mode won’t save you from phishing websites, either.

Myth: “It’s a Mac, it can’t get a virus.”

This one is a little more complicated, but the important thing to remember is that it is by no means true.

Time for a history lesson: Historically, Windows-based devices held a much, much larger market share than Apple’s Macs did. As a result, it was just more economical for hackers to invest their time in targeting hardware that many more people possessed. For a long time, this meant that Macs had vastly fewer viruses written to attack them.

However, one doesn’t have to look very hard at this point to see how much that has changed. Apple products are everywhere… and as a result, so are threats developed to target them, specifically.

Myth: “My servers are way safer than the cloud.”

Your confidence is impressive, but a modern data center is far more secure than your business will be.

It can be easy to feel more secure about something you can physically see and touch, but this is a false sense of security. An in-house server could be protected by a few locks and a basic alarm system, with one or a few internal employees maintaining it, and little more than a prayer protecting it from fires, floods, power outages, or any other issues. Comparatively, dedicated cloud servers are protected by armed guards, biometric authentication, redundancies, and a laundry list of other security measures.

Meanwhile, you get more or less the same level of access, with a far higher standard of security.

Trust Us to Guide Your Business’ IT Decisions

You need your technology to be maintained based on best practices, and for that, it’s important to have the right resources in your corner. We can be that resource for you.

If you’re ready to establish a more secure, more strategic business technology infrastructure, give us a call at (781) 715-1900.