Best Email Practices for Companies to Adopt

Emails have become a fundamental communication channel for many people and companies. Email is a powerful tool that should be used with consideration for the best results. Here we go through some of the best email etiquette practices that companies should consider adopting for their members of staff to ensure professionalism and efficiency at all times.

1.    Be clear in subject lines

Ensure that your subject lines are as clear as possible. You want the recipient to understand exactly what the email will contain before they even open it.

2.    Always use a professional email address that is standard across the company

Ensure every member of staff uses a professional email address. Never let them use their personal emails and try and obtain a company domain so all will be standardized. This provides professionalism and is expected from companies now.

5 Steps for creating a cyber security prevention plan

Cybercrime is risk to any business with an online presence. Cyber-attacks can have huge and sometimes detrimental implications for a business. A cyber- attack may even reduce trust in the company which can dramatically affect sales. As technological sophistication levels rise hackers are becoming equally as sophisticated. All companies should ensure they have a security prevention plan in place to try and avoid the damage cyber-attacks could do.

Here we discuss the 5 steps to improve cyber security in your business.

10 things for IT departments to do when an employee leaves their job

It is inevitable that you will have employees come and go throughout the years. Whether the employee has left due to poor performance, the company downsizing, or they are moving on to another job, you must consider the actions needed to happen to ensure once they have left your company data remains secure. Here we discuss a checklist of actions you need to take to ensure IT security remains tight once an employee has left. Regardless of whether there was hostility when the employee left or it was amicable, you can never be too safe when it comes to sensitive information and company secrets.

Once the decision has been made that the employee is leaving (regardless of whether this decision was made by the company or the individual) the HR department should let the IT department know immediately the date the employee is leaving so they can complete the actions on the checklist.

The dangers of working remotely

It is common nowadays to have a lot of your staff, at some point, working remotely. Whether this be from home, at a client’s office, in a coffee shop or by hiring freelancers, it has never been easier to access your work and continue your job outside of the office.

Despite this freedom being convenient and the fact that it can increase productivity, remote working can be potentially dangerous for the company. Here we discuss what the dangers and risks are and what actions you can implement to ensure online safety for all your staff that take their work out of the office.

How Office 365 can benefit your business

Office 365 is “Microsoft Office in the Cloud” and provides access to email, contacts, documents and calendars wherever you are via cloud computing.

Office 365 comes with a range of functions which can be extremely useful to your staff. Some of these features you may not even be aware of, but they have the ability to revolutionise the way you work and improve both productivity and efficiency. Here we discuss some of the top features Microsoft Office 365 provides and how they can be used effectively within your business.

Lots of storage
A common problem, depending on your area of work, can be not having enough storage. With Office 365 each user gets 50GB worth of storage with Exchange online that can be used for emails, storing contacts, your calendar, storing notes, etc. Having access to the OneDrive cloud storage on email also means you can save space by using this for attachments. Each user also gets 1TB of storage available through OneDrive so there is no worry about running out of space.

How safe is your password?

There has never been a more important time for your company to be as secure as possible online. With the constant development of technology, it has become more common for cyber threats to occur.

Having passwords online is the first step to achieve this security, however, it is scary when you hear potentially how easy it is for people to break through these passwords if they are not strong enough. This poses a security risk for both the individual and the business as a whole so it is vital that all passwords used are as strong as they can be. Password theft is growing in popularity and can lead to a privacy breech of data or even identity theft. This article discusses the dangers of password theft and what actions businesses can take to ensure that their assets remain safe.

What is a firewall and why do you need one?

Firewalls are a protective barrier between your computer, phone or tablet and the other computers that are connected to you. As soon as you are connected to the internet, the whole world can see you and this can make your computer vulnerable to cyber threats. When data is exchanged between computers it goes into cyberspace. Firewalls monitor this data to decide whether it is safe, and therefore firewalls are essential!

If your computer is left unprotected, it can quickly be attacked with popup messages and viruses among other things, all in a matter of minutes. Having a firewall installed can prevent some of these attacks from taking place. In some instances, hackers can install a trojan (malware which is misleading to the user) onto your PC which will give them the power to control it.

How Cloud Computing can help your business

Cloud computing is everywhere and has definitely become part of our daily lives. Whether you are watching films, listening to music, editing documents or checking your email, you are already using it. Cloud computing is about storing data on the internet rather than hard drives, meaning you can store unlimited amounts of data over the internet which was impossible before.

How can your business benefit?
There are many reasons why many businesses across the world are using Cloud computing. Here a just a few:

9 Reasons why your computer may be slow

It can be extremely frustrating when your computer is slow as it can reduce your productivity and make you job harder. There are many reasons why your computer may be slow, some of which are simple and easy to avoid.

1.    Your hard drive may be failing
This can happen over time as a hard drive is constantly moving and, as with anything that consists of moving parts, they can eventually wear down.

How to fix: Run a hard drive check.

Kwik Fit hack highlights dangers of malware for businesses

Recently we wrote an article detailing predictions from some of the world’s top experts including McAfee and the World Economic Forum forecasting greater levels of hacking and phishing in 2019. Well it appears that we have the first major casualty of 2019 with a major hack of UK firm Kwik Fit’s computer network.

The popular car service specialist has over 600 garages across the United Kingdom and Ireland and provides tyres, exhausts, batteries and breaks as well as MOT testing and car servicing. However, the chain experienced a recent malware attack which caused huge delays to customers’ car repairs as garages were unable to process orders.

Global cyber-attack would cost businesses billions

A new report has produced findings in which it claims that a coordinated global cyber attack could cause economic damage of between £65-96 billion.

In the hypothetical scenario developed for Lloyds of London and Aon, findings showed that a malicious campaign similar to those of real-life ransomware (such as WannaCry and Not Petya) could spread around the world incredibly quickly and cause devastating damage in its wake.

The scenario involved an infected email which once opened forwards itself to all contacts. It estimated that within 24 hours, data on 30 million devices worldwide could be encrypted and business owners faced with the prospect of paying a ransom or losing their data.

The impact on those businesses through reduced operation, productivity, consumption, ransomware payments and disruption to the supply chain was estimated to be in the tens of billions with businesses most heavily impacted in Europe and North America.

Has your email been stolen in massive data leak?

Dubbed a ‘mega-leak’, more than 2.2 billion stolen emails and passwords have surfaced online in a leak that is growing bigger by the day.

First reported on January 17, 2019 by researcher Troy Hunt, the leak included an astonishing number of email addresses and password combinations. However, upon further investigation the list of breached data was even bigger than first suspected, with 2.2 billion user’s worth of data included.

The data is apparently an amalgamation of leaked email addresses and passwords from other various leaks in recent years (Yahoo, LinkedIn, Dropbox, etc.) bundled together in an easily downloadable package for illicit purposes.

It has been reported by tech website Wired that the leak is being shared among hacker circles on forums and through torrents providing what is essentially a ‘phone book’ of email address credentials. This effectively allows any would-be hacker to attempt to gain access to websites using those credentials in the hopes that the password remains unchanged.