Network Solutions Unlimited Blog

In 1996, the United States Congress passed the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, better known as HIPAA, in an attempt to streamline the healthcare system while also maintaining individual privacy of individuals’ health records. This regulation allowed people to more effectively and securely transfer their health coverage without the risk of fraud or abuse of health records. As you can imagine, your technology plays a significant role in making this happen.

In today’s world of flexible working environments and conditions, you want to be intentional with how you share and distribute access to your company’s data. You’ll need to ensure that you are not accidentally putting your data in harm’s way due to outdated and insecure data retrieval policies and procedures.

Individual data privacy is finally gaining steam in a lot of places. There are more state laws being passed than ever before and even the businesses that prosper off the holdings of this data are doing more to allow people to protect their likeness online. Today, we want to discuss how to remove some of your personal data from a Google Search result. 

For the past decade or so, one of the most mentioned emerging technologies is blockchain. It was hailed as the technology that would change everything, but as far as the practical uses that would facilitate that change, blockchain hasn’t seemed to have done much. Today, we thought we would take a closer look at blockchain and why it hasn’t become the world-altering technology a lot of people were expecting.

In today’s financially motivated world, financial technology - AKA “fintech” - has allowed people to manage their finances without stepping into a bank. In fact, a Bank of America study found that 62 percent of people now use digital banking. Therefore, it seems prudent to share a few ways to keep yourself safe while using these kinds of mobile apps.

After 143 million people had their personal information put at risk in the Equifax data breach, it comes as no surprise that data security is an even hotter topic than usual. As much as you’d like to think that a breach like that would never happen to your business, this is an unrealistic hope that won’t do you any good if the threat of a data breach does come around. It is much better to be prepared.

When a business utilizes any kind of technology, there will come a time when that technology needs to be replaced--which means that the business will need to be sure that any data on the old machines cannot be recovered. This, in turn, means that the machine’s hard drive must be destroyed. In order to be absolutely certain that this has been accomplished, it helps to lean on the guidelines established by HIPAA.

Cryptocurrency, most notably Bitcoin, has made the headlines in recent months with huge fluctuations in supposed value. While the topic of cryptocurrency is one that would take far more than a single blog post to discuss, we can examine the technology that allows these currencies to exist and posit what it could likely be used for in the near future.

It is remarkable how much trust people have in Internet-based companies. Not just that they will fulfill the expectations placed on them, but that people routinely provide extremely sensitive information to these companies without thinking for a second about what they do with it. We will take a look at data collection practices, what Internet companies want with that data, and how millions of people every year become victims because they entrust their PII (Personally Identifiable Information) to corporations that promptly lose it.

Your business needs to have data backup and disaster recovery, period. There is no exception to this rule. The hard truth of the matter is that your business is risking far too much by not implementing data backup and disaster recovery. Today, we’ll examine scenarios in which a business might find its data threatened, as well as how modern businesses can keep their data safe, even when the world seems out to get them.

With the mountainous success of Game of Thrones, the BBC-produced show has always been understandably concerned with their security. However, with the show officially overtaking the original source material, A Song of Ice and Fire, there is an increased presence of curious fans and members of the press with an eye out for a sneak peek at the action. This has led to more; somewhat more modern measures being adopted to keep the production’s secrets safe.

If you’ve watched the news lately, chances are you’ve seen the Equifax breach and the ridiculous fallout it has caused. Over 133 million personal records have been stolen. While it’s difficult not to feel individually victimized by such a breach, it’s important to remember that it’s often not your specific credentials targeted by hackers. Since businesses often hold onto valuable information, they have big crosshairs painted onto them. It doesn’t even stop there--any vendors or partners you deal with are also in danger of hacking attacks.

Most small businesses don’t have the luxury of an in-house IT department. Even if they do have one, it’s likely a small department run by a handful of folks who have their hands full with either implementation projects or simply staying afloat. With opportunities to invest in the improvement of your infrastructure few and far between, a network audit can help you identify where your network suffers most, and what you can do about it.

As invaluable as the security solutions that protect a network are, they can be effectively rendered useless if a cybercriminal is skilled in social engineering. Social engineering is the practice of using manipulation to access protected resources, as we will review later. If your business and its team are vulnerable to a social engineering attempt, you are missing a critical piece of your data security strategy.

You can never know whether or not that app you just downloaded to your smartphone can expose your data or identity to risk. While Google Play and the iTunes store certainly put efforts into ensuring that users can safely browse their app stores, it’s unlikely that they can find every single malicious app out there before it infects someone’s device. Therefore, you need to consider the following measures to ensure that you don’t put your business at risk by downloading unsecure apps.

As though the initial news of Equifax’s 2017 data exposure wasn’t bad enough, it has been discovered that there are even more victims than previously thought. While news like this is never good, it can bring a silver lining if the opportunities that such news presents are seized.