Central Illinois' IT Experts

Consideration #1: Departmental Needs
Your workers don’t all do the same things. You probably have several departments that you need to find IT for; all with their own specific needs. Knowing exactly how much processing power, storage, and software requirements are for every worker on your staff before purchasing new hardware can save you money and time.

Consideration #2: How Mobile Do You Need Them to Be?
These days, mobility is one of the most pressing considerations you need to have when purchasing the hardware your company will need to get work done from anywhere. If mobility is a major consideration for certain members of your staff, you will likely want to outfit them with laptop computers and mobile devices depending on your organization’s mobility needs.

As far as workstations go, they don’t always have to be high-end computing apparatuses. Most of the time--especially if there are workers that don’t need high-end technology to complete their assigned tasks--a simple laptop will do. Laptops likely cost marginally less than putting together a full desktop computer and can be just what your business needs to promote the productivity needed.

Consideration #3: What Do They Need to Do with It?
This brings us to the uses your employees need their computing platforms for. The more resource intensive the software that your organization depends on, the more resources your workstations will need. It’s that simple. Say you run a small company and you have one computer for your business. You’ll probably want to commit to buy a computer that is a little more than your software requirements demand in case you want room to upgrade or add new, more useful solutions down the road.

For the average office, however, it behooves you to pay attention to the software requirements for each position on your staff. Since computing resources (hardware, software {cloud or local}) aren’t cheap, to keep costs down, each position should be given a technology budget, and any IT expenses for that position should not exceed that budget. It may seem like a time-intensive process, but in most cases, hardware and software requirements will be similar for a lot of your staff.

For those employees that have to use resource-intensive software in order to properly do their jobs, be sure not to skimp on their machines. The better the hardware these employees have at their disposal, the more effective they can be. One resource-intensive program that many businesses use is a CRM or some sort of accounting software that allows them to track service time. Look on this software as mandatory and ensure that every workstation and mobile device can run your necessary line of business applications.

Consideration #4: What Does Your Staff Think?
Everyone knows just how frustrating using inferior technology can be. If you came to work every day only to use a computer that routinely wastes your time, you would have a problem with it. When deciding on how to move forward with your computing initiatives, understand that your staff wants to be as efficient as you want them to be. Getting them hardware and software that allows them to be the best workers they can be will go a long way toward making your company as successful as it can be.

By now, a majority of your staff has a smartphone. As to not put the organization at risk, you should implement a comprehensive Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) policy. It will allow your staff to utilize their personal devices on your business network, and will allow you to protect said network from the threats those device potentially bring in..

Purchasing, managing, and maintaining technology can get a little hectic. Let the IT professionals at Decatur Computers Inc. help you come up with a company-wide IT strategy that will allow you to get the computing you need at a price that won’t be an obstacle. Call us today at 217-475-0226 for more information.

Close a Tab
Again, keep in mind that when we say “basic,” we mean it. You can close a tab by clicking on the little “x” at the edge of the browser. You can also close a tab by clicking on it with the mouse wheel, a technique known as “middle-clicking.” This might not make much of a difference in the long run, but it’s certainly easier to close multiple tabs this way than by clicking on each individual “x.”

Quick Address Bar
If you ever want to visit a different website or search for something with a search engine, you can just type something in the address bar at the top of your browser window. While you can click in the address bar, you want to keep as many options in mind as possible. You can try pressing F6, Alt+D, or Ctrl+L to all do the same thing. It will bring you to the address bar and highlight its contents, as well as give you a chance to continue typing.

Viewing Slideshows or Multi-Page Articles
You know those annoying articles that look like slideshows? It can be a major pain to view them all one after another. You can turn it into one page so you don’t have to fight the website just for the information you need. To get started, just try to print the page. You can either click Print or use Ctrl+P to start it up. This provides a print preview of the page, but more importantly, you’ll have an uninterrupted view of the slideshow.

Highlighting More Accurately
Highlighting text online can be tricky, as it requires that you click and drag from a starting point to an ending point. You might accidentally highlight too much or too little, resulting in your text being an inaccurate representation of what you want. Instead of worrying about whether or not you’ll copy too much of the text, you can click on the starting point of the selection and shift-click the end point of the text. This selects all of the text between two points.

Toggle to Full-Screen Mode
Productivity can be tough when the Internet is filled with so many distractions, and that’s not even mentioning all of the difficulties you might have with other workstation software or tools. You can set your window to full-screen mode to help you focus. To do this, you just have to press F11, and it can be toggled on or off this way.

Can you think of a few keyboard shortcuts for use in a browser? Let us know in the comments.

To give our readers just a taste of what they are up against, we’ve decided to put together a list of the most devastating hacks, infiltrations, and malware attacks that have happened so far in 2018. Additionally, we provide some telling statistics that will put into perspective just how important your network security and cybersecurity initiatives are.

Public
January

• The Department of Homeland Security was affected by a data breach that exposed information about 247,167 current and former employees.

March

• Atlanta, Georgia was targeted by a ransomware attack called SamSam. This resulted in a massive problem for their municipal infrastructure. The ransom price given was $51,000, but Atlanta’s leadership refused to meet these demands. Overall, the numbers show that Atlanta has spent more than 10 times that number in the fallout of the attack. Some estimates place the actual cost of this event at nearly $20 million.
• India’s national ID database, Aadhaar, leaked data of over a billion people. This is one of the largest data breaches in history. A user could pay 500 rupees, equal to about $7, to get the login credentials that allowed anyone to enter a person’s 12-digit code for their personal information. For 300 rupees, or about $4.20, users could also access software that could print an ID card for anyone associated with the database.
• Cambridge Analytica, a data analytics company that U.S. President Donald Trump used to help his campaign, harvested personal information from over 50 million Facebook users without asking for their permission. Facebook hasn’t called this a data breach, but Cambridge Analytica has since been banned from using the service thanks to this event.

June

• A hack of a U.S. Government-funded active shooter training center exposed the personal data of thousands of U.S. law enforcement officials. This also exposed which police departments aren’t able to respond to an active shooter situation.

Private
January

• 280,000 Medicaid records were exposed when a hacker attacked the Oklahoma State University Center for Health Sciences. Among the information exposed were patient names, provider names, and full names for affected individuals.

February

• An unsecured server owned by Bongo International, a company acquired by FedEx, leaked over a hundred-thousand files of FedEx customers. Some of the information leaked included names, drivers’ licenses, national ID cards, voting cards, and utility bills.

March

• Orbitz, a travel booking site, fell victim to a security vulnerability that exposed 880,000 customers’ payment card information. There was also about two whole years of customer data stolen from their server.
• French news site L’Express left a database that wasn’t password-protected up for weeks, despite being warned about the security issues regarding this.
• 134,512 records regarding patients and financial records at the St. Peter’s Surgery and Endoscopy Center in Albany, NY were accessed by hackers.
• MyFitnessPal, an application used by Under Armor, exposed about 150 million people’s personal information to threats.
• The WannaCry ransomware claimed another victim in Boeing, which stated that “a few machines” were protected by Microsoft’s 2017 patch.

May

• Thanks to Twitter storing user passwords in a plaintext file that may have been exposed by internal company staff, the social media titan had to force hundreds of millions of users to change their password.
• An unauthenticated API found on T-Mobile’s website exposed the personal information of all their customers simply through the use of their cell phone number. The following information was made available: full name, address, account numbers, and tax IDs.
• A bug found in Atlassian development software titles Jira and Confluence paved the way for hackers to sneak into IT infrastructure of several companies and one U.S. government agency.
• Rail Europe, a popular server used by American travelers to acquire rail tickets, experienced a three-month data breach that exposed credit card information to hackers.

June

• A marketing company named Exactis had 340 million records stolen from it, but what’s most shocking about this is that they had accumulated information about nearly every American out there. In response to the breach, there was a class action lawsuit made against the company.
• Adidas’s website was hacked, resulting in a loss of a few million users’ personal and credit card information.
• A hacker collective called Magecart initiated a campaign to skim at least 800 e-commerce sites, including Ticketmaster, for sensitive information.

That list of traumatic security issues all occurred in the first half of 2018. This doesn’t consider the major hacks that are still affecting people from 2017 and before. Some examples include the Friendfinder hack that exposed 412 million user accounts, and the well-documented Equifax data breach that leaked the financial information of over 147 million people. Here are some of the statistics to help put in perspective the state of Internet threats at present:

• In 2017 over 130 large-scale breaches were reported, a 27 percent increase over 2016.
• Nearly 1-in-3 organization have experienced some sort of cyberattack in the past.
• Cryptojacking (stealing cryptocurrency) increased 8,500 percent in 2017.
• 100,000 organizations were infected with the WannaCry ransomware (400,000 machines).
• 5.4 billion WannaCry attacks were blocked in 2017.
• The average monetary cost of a malware attack is $2.4 million.
• The average time cost of a malware is 50 days.
• Ransomware cost organization’s over $5 billion in 2017.
• 20 percent of cyber attacks come from China, 11 percent from the United States, and six percent from the Russian Federation.
• Phone numbers are the most leaked information.
• 21 percent of files are completely unprotected.
• 41 percent of companies have over 1,000 sensitive files left unprotected.
• Ransomware is growing at 350 percent annually.
• IoT-based attacks are growing at about 500 percent per year.
• Ransomware attacks are expected to quadruple by 2020.
• 7.7 percent of web requests lead to malware.
• There were 54 percent more types of malware in 2017 than there were in 2016.
• The cybersecurity market will be worth over $1 trillion by 2025.

If this list is as scary to you as it is to us, you’ll do your best to secure your network, data, and infrastructure from Internet-based threats. For more information about how to facilitate a comprehensive cybersecurity strategy, call us today at 217-475-0226.