Category: Featured News

There’s a lot to think about when starting a small business and a lot of investment to be made when you start to grow, but with the internet and many technological advances in recent years, business expansion may not follow the traditional patterns you’ve in the past. Being able to connect wirelessly to work resources nowadays means a larger office space is no longer has to be a top priority when your workforce starts to expand. An increasing number of businesses are employing remote workers that use telecommunications to work with colleagues and clients.

There are numerous benefits to using remote workers over in-house office employees, they are usually more productive and will stick around for longer periods of time as they will they have a better work-life balance than those who have to commute every day of the week. They will also save your business money as they will not need to use office facilities or utilities on a daily basis, something that does add up over time. Cutting down on commuters will also reduce your business’s carbon contribution to the environment and you will be able to source employees from all over the world.

The software and mobile communications that supports remote working within business is always advancing and expanding, so there should be programs available to suit your business needs. From using Google Meet to host conference calls with project team members to installing apps such as Harvest to monitor working hours, all bases can be covered remotely and online.

You don’t even necessarily have to provide workers with a separate, dedicated mobile phone as communication systems like RingCentral provide a mobile system that can connect wirelessly to your office’s telephone infrastructure. Downloading the App onto a smart phone will provide users with all their usual office extension numbers and a business number to dial out from straight from their phone. You can set up a work voicemail and include features such as fax, text and conferencing if you wish.

One area to think about when deciding to use a remote working infrastructure instead of a traditional office environment is the protection of your business data and information when using mobile communications. Depending on how large your company grows, you may wish to seek out legal advice from cell tower lease consultants such as Telecom Tower Attorneys who can advise you on how best to structure the wireless and broadband needs of your business. It is important to adhere to government rules and regulations when it comes to data protection so it is always best to seek guidance from the professionals.

When your online infrastructure is up and running, it will be easy to expand your workforce and watch your business grow. Employee interview can be conducted via Skype and Google Documents can be used for training materials. When you have a procedure in place, new starters will find it easy to learn about the daily routines and jobs that need completing with the remote office environment.

At their heart, many criminals are also entrepreneurs – they’ve just decided to embrace the faster money and higher risks of illegal markets. However, just like other entrepreneurs, every criminal wants to maximize their ROI – increasing the amount of money they are earning while minimizing the amount they are spending. For however many dollars they put in, they can expect to get a certain number of dollars out. Here are some of the scams you need to know about.

CEO Fraud

A new type of scam which promises to enhance the ROI of many existing operations is beginning to be more frequently deployed by scammers. The Business Email Compromise (BEC), also known as ceo fraud, is a variant on conventional phishing attacks that businesses need to watch out for.

Phishing Attacks

Phishing attacks use emails that are masquerading as legitimate messages, containing links or attachments that look harmless but actually enable an attacker to execute malicious code. A spear phishing email is a phishing email that has been carefully crafted for a particular recipient. These were a notable feature of the Russian attacks on the 2016 elections – a spear phishing email crafted specifically for John Podesta ended up granting GRU access to the entire DNC network.

More About Spear Phishing

Spear phishing emails are more likely to be successful than the scattergun approach that phishing spam takes. Regular phishing emails rely upon users being susceptible and, for the most part, technologically illiterate. Often the scammers will have a list of emails from some database or other – every time one of those high-profile data breaches occur that we all collectively shrug our shoulders at, millions of people’s information is exposed.

Sometimes, passwords are exposed in these breaches, although that is relatively rare. When passwords are exposed, they are usually encrypted and, if the service in question takes security seriously, they will also be salted and hashed.

However, this is not always the case. You can enter an old email address into haveibeenpwned.com to see how many times it has been exposed in a breach and any passwords that have been exposed alongside it.

BEC Scam

The BEC scam utilizes spear phishing, spoofing, type squatting, or some other type of phishing attack, inducing the user to enter their username and password, thinking they are logging into a legitimate service.

The email itself deploys urgency and claims to have been sent at the behest of a CFO or CEO who is now in a meeting and therefore unavailable.  To disguise the lack of a corporate signature, the scammers use the ‘Sent from my iPad’ signature and explain that they are using a personal device. This also enables the scammers to get away with imperfect English as mistakes are written off as autocorrect. If hackers have any additional information that they can use to make themselves seem legitimate, they will often throw that in too.

In some cases, the scammers will use social engineering to convince employees to do things they normally wouldn’t. The best way to defend against this attack is to educate your employees about it. Once they know about it, it is fortunately easy to spot. Never open attachments you aren’t expecting without verifying in person that they are legitimate. Don’t open links or attachments from email addresses you don’t recognize, even if they purport to be from someone you know.