I.T. Overdrive

Ransomware is back in the news. Over the July 4 holiday weekend, small businesses around the world were targeted by hackers demanding ransoms. These supermarkets, schools, libraries, and dentists were unfortunately vulnerable to an attack such as this, which is more common than you would imagine. And this case shows these are skilled, persistent and determined criminals.

In today's episode I recall another ransomware attack and answer a couple of key questions that may be going through your mind. Firstly, you may be wondering, how did hackers break through our systems? Unfortunately, the personal experiences we have had with these bad actors were related to systems where we had suggested upgraded security, but for one reason or another the clients hadn't yet implemented our suggestions.

And another big question, one we hear all the time, is, "How do I know they will hand over the encryption keys when we send the money?" The answer is simple, they want to keep getting paid for similar activities in the future. They are afraid that if they don't hand over they keys when they get the cash, those who are hacked will stop handing over the money. Which is true.

Network security is a big deal. Hackers are out there and if you leave the door open, they will come on in and hold you hostage. Listen in and if you have any questions give us a call. We're happy to answer any questions and give a recommendation if you think this could happen to you.

Get all links, resources and show notes at https://itoverdrivepodcast.com/6

Network security is currently a hot topic, but it's always been big with us. Hackers are always working to find new ways to pry their way into business networks, unfortunately. And their goals are usually nefarious. Lately we've heard some high profile stories involving ransoms demanded from hackers using ransomware, which will lock your files until you pay up.

We certainly have solutions and systems for keeping these bad actors out, but we also have some experience getting access back after these criminals have hacked a network. Today I'm telling a true story of a ransomware event with one of our clients. This ended costing the client a lot more than if the software we had been recommending for quite some time had been installed.

This sort of thing doesn't just happen to big companies with super deep pockets. Often, smaller companies with older and weaker security systems in place make easier targets for these type of hacks. You likely won't hear about them very often, because these companies don't want their customers and prospects to know they were hacked, it would put a big dent in their trustworthiness.

Listen in and if you have any questions give us a call. We're happy to answer any questions and give a recommendation if you think this could happen to you.

Get all links, resources and show notes at https://itoverdrivepodcast.com/5

Obviously the big one right now is security. We're big on that. We like to come in and the first thing we do for new clients, even existing clients, we will run a full security assessment against their network. It goes out crawls through the entire network, hits every single device, does an in-depth review, and spits out a report. It takes about 48 hours so it's extremely in depth. It's a long report we go through and pare it down, parse it out, pull out the things that are important, the things we need to address.

This takes a lot of the guesswork out of it. It's a printed copy that says, here's where your pitfalls are, here's where your holes are and here's how we can plug them. Right now, the network security is the big one. The malware, the ransomware, these things are happening almost daily now and you're hearing about them in the news. There was a large hack that came down from Microsoft yesterday.

They believed the Chinese government threw this out there for their Microsoft exchange mail servers. We actually had an all hands on deck yesterday, going through our client's mail servers. Thankfully, a lot of our clients are using email in the cloud now, but we do have a few that do still run their own mail servers. We found three actually had the hack loaded on. And what we're reading this morning is there's about 85% of the servers that Microsoft has in the U.S. were hacked.

They basically went out and put in place the tools to do some damage, but haven't actually done anything. It was kind of a probe just to see if they could, and we were going in, cleaning those out, making sure there was no residual leftover after that. Pretty much the whole I.T. world was doing that yesterday.

So security is a big one for us, especially with our small clients. Providing security can get expensive quickly. We try to put together what we in the industry call a stack, which is a set of tools that allow the customer to have a secure network. We use the same brand model, typically, of firewall for all of our clients.

We found the one that we liked the best at the price point that our clients feel comfortable with. Same on the antivirus software side, the malware software side, spam filtering. We have this stack of utilities, software, and hardware that we can come in and sell as a package and works for pretty much every client that we have.

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We have a few clients that like to think of themselves as technically inclined, they like to tinker. They sometimes think they know that they know how to tackle their technology because they set their kids X-Box up on their wifi network at their house over Christmas.

Then they try to take that and apply that to their business. They get into it and find out, oh, this is not my home router and this is not the X-Box with the nice big screen and the controller. I can just pick my preferences out right there. That's one of the pitfalls we see, especially with, you some of our smaller clients who are looking to save money.

They want to do as much of this as they can themselves. They may have a guy on staff. It's typically the young guy that they'll go to, to try to troubleshoot things before they give us a call. And it always comes back to us worse than what we left it. So it takes a little longer to fix.

It costs a little more. And the guy that tried to do it, his production went down for the month because he was playing computer guy. It initially happens when someone has a new businesses or smaller businesses and they're, and they're really trying to cut costs, which means they're trying to cut corners.

And that usually means they're paying more in the end. So we see that quite a bit. Again, smaller clients, as they grow, they tend to kind of grow out of that. They tend to know, okay, well, I've got to focus on my business and my guys need to focus on their business. And, you know, I can't have my employees spending their days trying to troubleshoot things when I've got this other company here that can do it efficiently, have it done, and get us back on track.

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Are you getting your money's worth from the I.T. guy you hired? You brought him in, you can see him every day. You see him at eight and leaving at five and know he's here, which means he has to be doing something, right?

Once you factor in salary, benefits, vacation time, and everything that goes along with hiring someone, is it worth it? And you also have to remember that person can also leave at any time. (And technology guys are notorious for job hopping.) With an outsource provider, you get consistency. It's the same all the time, no matter what, and. The cost is always much lower than hiring in-house for a small to mid-size business.

When I'm out meeting with potential clients, the one thing that I focus on is establishing trust and a relationship, not necessarily the technical knowledge, which obviously we have, but I want to make them feel good about doing business with Herod technology.

I want to make them feel comfortable, feel like we're going to be a great partner for them, and this is going to be nice and easy, and they're going to have no issues. And they don't. Our turnover with clients is very low. I bet I can count on one hand in the last 20 years, the clients, we have lost due to them going to another provider.

I've got clients that have been with me since day one. And you know, they stick around because we see this as a relationship, not a business contract.

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Kicking off I.T. Overdrive where you can learn how to solve and prevent I.T. nightmares today, welcome! Host Kelly Herrod gives some background to Herrod Technology, the company he started 20 years ago to help small and medium-sized businesses with outsourced I.T services. Many smaller companies cannot afford to have a full-time I.T. person on staff, and they also cannot afford to be down because of technology or computer issues.

And even if you're big enough to have an I.T. person on staff, they have to leave for vacations or holidays, and that's when bad things tend to happen. Outsourced I.T. services can be your answer. Listen in as Kelly explains a bit about what they do and how they can help you avoid those issues which are bound to come up.

Get all links, resources and show notes at https://itoverdrivepodcast.com/1