The advent of 5G technology signals a monumental leap forward in the realm of telecommunications. Unlike its predecessors, 5G promises not just incremental improvements but transformative changes that affect every aspect of our digital lives. From higher speeds to lower latency, 5G is set to redefine connectivity and pave the way for an array of futuristic applications.
In an era where digital transformation is at the forefront of technological advancement, edge computing has emerged as a game-changing paradigm. As the volume of data generated by internet-connected devices continues to skyrocket, the traditional model of centralized cloud computing is being pushed to its limits. Enter edge computing, a decentralized approach that brings computation and data storage closer to the location where it is needed. This shift is poised to revolutionize industries, enhance real-time processing, and address the growing demand for faster, more efficient data handling.
Microsoft's Windows 10 has been the operating system of choice for millions of users around the world since its release in 2015. But all good things must come to an end, and Windows 10 is no exception. In 2021, Microsoft announced that Windows 10 will reach its end of life in 2025. With 2025 just around the corner, end-users need to start planning now for a smooth transition. Without continued support and security updates, using an unsupported version of Windows 10 could expose users to risks like malware, ransomware, and other security vulnerabilities.
Adversary-in-the-middle (AitM) attacks are a type of cyberattack that involves an unauthorized third party intercepting and altering the communication between two legitimate parties. AitM attacks can target individuals, organizations, or the public, and they can have various motives, such as espionage, theft, sabotage, or impersonation. AitM attacks can take many forms, such as eavesdropping, tampering, spoofing, or redirecting.
A simple tip to protect your privacy and security
The National Security Agency (NSA) recently issued a cybersecurity advisory recommending that smartphone users reboot their devices at least once a week. The NSA said that this simple action can help prevent hackers from exploiting vulnerabilities and gaining access to sensitive data, such as contacts, photos, messages, and passwords.
We’ve been talking a lot about session hijacking recently and we’re starting to get a lot of questions about what that term means. By definition, a session hijack is a security attack where an unauthorized person takes control of a user's authorized session in a computer system.
In a typical online scenario, when a user logs into a website or application, a session is established between the user and the server to maintain their authenticated state. This session is generally maintained through the use of session tokens or cookies.
Session hijacking occurs when an attacker intercepts or steals the session information, allowing them to impersonate the legitimate user and gain unauthorized access to the system. There are several methods through which session hijacking can be carried out:
Please be aware that Microsoft Office 2013 has reached its end of life, effective April 11, 2023. This means that Microsoft will no longer provide support, updates, or security patches for the Office 2013 suite. While the software will continue to function, its lack of ongoing support and security updates may leave you vulnerable to potential security threats.
Back in 1999, the first Prometheans were trying to come up with a name for this venture of ours. Earlier tales have been told of how Promethius came to be a part of it, but what I’d like to discuss today revolves around the “Consulting” portion of that storied name.
You see, consulting has always been a major value that we bring to the table, but many of our clients don’t avail themselves of it. In the early years of the Promethius experience, it was very common for Prometheans to be part of our clients’ teams. We attended staff meetings, board meetings and sometimes even staff birthday parties. We consulted on annual budgets, strategic initiatives and even staffing decisions. As technology progressed, however, it became much more common for small companies to departmentalize their tech. It became common practice to rely on software vendors for advice on software functionality, for instance. Rather than work with a trusted advisor to gather requirements and wish lists, company leaders, and sometimes general staff, would start meeting with software vendors and let the demos do their work.
In recent years, many of our prospects/customers approach us already knowing the products and services they wish to purchase. Too often this sort of thinking has led to computer support being viewed as a commodity. Seeking the lowest-priced help desk support can cause some real problems and has left many small companies in dangerous positions in this age of cyber threats.
The risks today are too great to rely on client/vendor relationships. We need to go back to a world of partnership. We need relationships in which we can have real discussions of threats, problems, options and solutions. If there is no trust, then everything seems like a sales pitch. The fact is that the most profitable solution for Promethius, the vendor, is often the “solution” that we would advise against. It would be easy, for instance, to recommend a time and materials solution to our clients that only reacts to problems after they have revealed themselves through some sort data loss or security breach. This kind of arrangement might be good for our bottom line, but it would be irresponsible for us to recommend such a strategy.
So, the moral to the tale is to discuss technology strategies with your trusted advisors and more importantly, choose vendors that you can trust as the number one criterion. View your technology providers as a team of experts that is there to help you make decisions to run your business. If your website developers can’t work with your SaaS providers or your Managed Services Provider, then some changes might be in order because technology needs to work in concert to be effective. Give us a call if you’re interested in discussing your IT strategy.
Promethius began migrating on-prem Microsoft Exchange Servers to the cloud about fifteen years ago and we haven’t looked back. Initially, multi-tenant, cloud-hosted Exchange Servers were owned by third-parties, like Intermedia and AppRiver. This arrangement worked very well until Microsoft decided to get serious about the hosting game in 2011 with Office 365 (I’m purposely ignoring their BPOS service that launched in 2008 because I still have nightmares about it). Microsoft seriously undercut the pricing of its own partners and put most of them out of business. The positive of this move, however, is that Office 365, and now Microsoft 365, have become very solid and essential business services boasting almost 2.4 million business customers. Of course, Microsoft 365 isn’t just email hosting, it’s hosted documents via SharePoint and OneDrive and it’s a project management via Planner and the list goes on and on.
In our 10 years of experience with Microsoft 365, we’ve had very few issues of lost emails/documents, but it should be recognized that Microsoft 365 doesn’t offer a traditional backup and recovery system with lots of retention options, etc. As far as disaster recovery of Microsoft servers go, they seem to rely on their extensive redundancy. This is probably adequate, but companies sometimes get caught off guard when it comes to the email and document retention policies. Deleted emails have a maximum recovery period of 31 days and SharePoint/OneDrive documents have a maximum recovery period of 93 days. Keep in mind also, that this isn’t the industry standard off-site backup. These emails and documents are saved to the same network that is hosting the live data. Many small companies choose not to pay for third-party backup even when these facts are pointed out, but a third-party backup of your most crucial communications and company documents is probably worth a discussion. You might be surprised to learn how affordable it is.
