Does hacker insurance make your business a bigger liability?

Monday, February 28th, 2011

It’s a scenario that every small online business fears: site security is compromised, hackers steal customer data including credit-card details, and your brand and your reputation are left in ruins. No wonder then, that many small online businesses are looking to insure against hackers and the resulting financial impact of a security breach. But is insurance really the answer and could it even be part of the problem?

The insurance brokers are, naturally, presenting such insurance as pure common sense. A chap who works in the insurance business used car insurance as a counter argument to my suggestion that surely the best IT security insurance policy was to remain secure in the first place.

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Can you trust Google sponsored results?

Friday, February 18th, 2011

It’s a simple question, do you trust Google? My confusing answer is yes and no. Yes, I trust Google to find more relevant information in less time than other search engines. No, I don’t trust Google to filter out all the cons and scams.

Indeed, the level of trust that I associate with Google search declines dramatically when it comes to those results that appear at the top and side of the page, you know, the ones with the very light text saying ‘Ads’ next to them. I cannot recall ever clicking on a ’sponsored search result’ for a couple of very good reasons:

1. The whole point of using Google is to uncover information that has been deemed relevant courtesy of the hugely complex algorithm at the heart of the search engine’s success, and not which has been dropped onto the page simply because someone paid for it to be there.

2. The bad guys have, for as long as I can remember, been using such sponsored results to lure people to their sites and whatever nefarious activity lies within.

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The plummeting price of stolen personal data

Thursday, February 17th, 2011

How much is your data worth? You may think that the customer database your business has built is priceless, and individuals probably regard their online data as being rather valuable as well. After all, that’s why we put so much effort into securing it. Unfortunately, the basic economic laws of supply and demand exist within the criminal marketplace just as they do elsewhere.

Which means that our perception of value is hugely over-inflated when compared to the reality of the online underground economy. That reality is that as malware production and exploitation has rocketed, and stolen data has flooded the marketplace, so the price has plummeted to pretty unbelievable lows.

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Five golden rules of small business continuity

Friday, February 4th, 2011

The Business Continuity Institute (BCI) has kindly informed me that the annual Business Continuity Awareness Week 2011 is due to take place from 21 to 25 March. It’s a global event designed to educate business about, and spread awareness of, business continuity issues. Given that it’s an annual event and I haven’t heard of it before, despite being an IT journalist with 20 years under my belt, it’s not a good start.

Not that I’m a huge fan of this sort of thing. Designated weeks or months for a specific activity, I mean – being a small business owner myself I am actually quite keen on business continuity. You only have to take a look at some of the events that Business Continuity Awareness Week shares March 2011 with to see what I mean: Brain Awareness Week, National Peanut Month, National Frozen Food Month, National Bed Month and my personal favourite, National Bubble Week.

But seriously, shouldn’t every business be aware of continuity issues every week of the year?

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How to physically secure your business hardware

Friday, January 21st, 2011

There seems to be something of a misconception, at the smaller end of the business scale at least, that data security is somehow a terribly complex thing that is also expensive to achieve properly. This myth is no doubt massaged just a little bit by small business consultants with one eye on the invoice.

The truth of the matter is somewhat different, of course, and basic data security is neither difficult nor expensive to achieve. All it takes is a little bit of technical know-how and an awful lot of common sense.

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vBulletin forums hit by reCAPTCHA cracking spam bot

Wednesday, January 12th, 2011

Since the holidays ended, security vendors have been happily telling me that spam levels have dropped dramatically. The spammers, they say, have taken some time off.

That may well have been the case as far as email spam was concerned, but back in the real world — which includes any business running a vBulletin forum for customer support — things have been far from quiet. In fact, there’s something of a spam crisis going on right now as it appears the bad guys have worked out how to crack the reCAPTCHA system that safeguards vBulletin-powered forum registrations from automated bots.

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How snowmaggedon exposed online retail flaws

Thursday, January 6th, 2011

According to the latest study from eDigitalResearch the UK has just experienced something of a truly digital Christmas. I’m not too surprised that 86% of us used the internet on Christmas Day and Boxing Day, or that 22% of us did it via a smartphone or tablet device.

It’s no great shock that 30% of folk visited the online sales on Boxing Day either, or that 62% of those shopping online over the Christmas weekend were looking for sales bargains.

What did surprise me, however, was just how badly some of the biggest names in retail dealt with the snowmageddon disruption in the lead up to the seasonal festivities when compared to your average small business.

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IT Expert Syndrome: is your data at risk?

Thursday, December 16th, 2010

I don’t consider myself an IT expert. I consider myself to be an enthusiastic user of technology who just happens to know a thing or two about specific IT subjects and has an ability to communicate that knowledge to others. Not everyone is so shy in stepping forward to don the ‘expert’ hat though, and that is causing problems for businesses.

The Urban Dictionary definition of Expert Syndrome is an ailment that is characterised by “the need to expound on a given topic beyond actual knowledge” and that advanced sufferers are “often unaware of the condition, losing the ability to distinguish opinion from fact”. Before you dismiss this right now as being just another of the many somewhat jovial opinion pieces fuelled by an excess of seasonal cheer, there is actually a rather serious side to IT Expert Syndrome. To grasp the seriousness of the problem you first have to appreciate the duality of the learning theory concept of transfer.

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Calculating the real cost of cloud computing

Wednesday, December 8th, 2010

This week I have been getting unpleasantly confused by a pre-Christmas present of cloud computing hype. Take the CEBR 2011 Cloud Dividend report, commissioned by EMC, which joyfully predicts that the cloud will benefit the European economy by as much as £148.9 billion per year by 2015. Other highlights include the creation of 289,000 jobs in the same timeframe, although the UK could apparently lag behind the rest of Europe courtesy of our relatively poor broadband infrastructure.

As regular PC Pro blog readers will know, I’ve already suggested that there is such a thing as free cloud computing for the small business. OK, the free lunch option is restricted to the very small end of the small business scale, and even then we are talking more Google Mail than a fully blown data centre in the cloud, but it’s a start. The smaller your business, the bigger the benefits of the free cloud rings true as far as I am concerned. What’s more, I would contend that it’s a damn site more relevant to most small businesses than reports of some notional global economic value of cloud computing sponsored by a company pushing the cloud as hard as it can.

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Thousands fall victim to Facebook profile scam

Monday, November 29th, 2010

I have to admit that I really don’t care who has looked at my Facebook profile. If I didn’t want people to see it I would nuke my Facebook account. If anyone who does take a look is so impressed by my boyish good looks and the eloquent charm of my update postings, then they can request to become my friend and I can merrily ignore them.

There are, in all honesty, many other things which take priority when it comes to worrying Mr Winder: when will the central-heating boiler start working again, how much snow is going to fall today and what will my nose look like by the end of the week after surgeons have finished operating on my face, for example. Yet, for tens of thousands of Facebook users the question has obviously been weighing heavy on their minds. At least that is the only explanation I can think of to explain why a rogue Facebook app is running riot right now.

“OMG, OMG, OMG! Now you can see who viewed your Facebook profile” the scam message doing the rounds suggests, and a click on the link allows you to download an app to reveal all.

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