Credential Management Vulnerabilities Exposed By Breaches

September 11, 2019June 1, 2017 by techprognosis

The recent breach of OneLogin is once again shining the spotlight on the safety and sanity of entrusting sensitive data to cloud-based credential management services. OneLogin provides single sign-on for cloud-based applications.

What Is A Credential Management Service?

Credential management services that offer Single Sign-On or SSO are great, but as we are beginning to find out, it could also be a single point of entry to a treasure trove of sensitive data for cyber criminals.

How Does A Credential Management Service Work?

The way credential management services work is that after a user of these Identity and credential management services sign into their account, the service takes care of remembering and supplying the customer’s usernames and passwords for all of their other applications. It pretty much attempts to save the user the pain and stress of trying to remember numerous passwords, security questions and other hoops people normally have to jump through just to access some online services.

What Is The Problem With Credential Management Services?

While a lot of these services promise secure access to, and a simplified Identity and Access Management (IAM), the recent spate of multiple breaches of LastPass and now OneLogin makes us wonder just how efficient and secure these credential management services really are. And here is why: a single compromise exposes the credentials of all users, especially if that data theft includes the ability to decrypt encrypted data [thanks to Mark Maunder of Wordfence for that emphasis].

A breach that allows intruders to decrypt customer data could be extremely damaging for affected customers.

The vulnerabilities in credential management services like LastPass were so bad that Tavis Ormandy, a security researcher at Google’s Project Zero wondered if people were “really using this lastpass thing” because he took a quick look and could see “a bunch of obvious critical problems”.

Mobile Device Safety Tips For Commercial Printing Executives

September 11, 2019March 25, 2017 by techprognosis

Mobile Device Safety Tips For Commercial Printing Executives

It is safe to say that most executives of commercial printing businesses are tied to their mobile phones. Given the sensitive nature of the customer data they sometimes have to manage and communicate, mobile device safety is very important.

Commercial printing executives sometimes have a crazy schedule, and usually have to deal with the erratic demands from customers who want the job done now, on the fly – even when Print-on-Demand customers submit design materials late, or approve proofs at the last minute.

Mobile devices come in handy for looking up requests for quotes, proof approvals, sending files to customers, and browsing websites. At times, when there is a little break from the hectic schedule, mobile devices allow us to keep in contact with friends and family, buy stuff, and pay bills.

Mobile devices can be a double-edged sword. They allow us to store data, contact information, photos, emails and files; and when we can afford to take breaks, provide a source for entertainment.

They could also be a major source of headaches by exposing users to malicious software.

Not managing their usage properly can lead to situations where all that personal information and valuable data, not to mention the information of customers and partners, could be at risk.

Prevent Downtime, Keep Cyber Thieves At Bay, and Prepare For Disaster

September 11, 2019March 21, 2017 by techprognosis

How Organizations Can Prevent Downtime And Ensure That Even If Cyber Thieves Keep A-Knockin’, They Can’t Come In

Small businesses and organizations in Round Rock, Texas and surrounding cities can prevent downtime, keep cyber thieves at bay, and prepare for disaster by implementing simple backup and disaster recovery strategies.

A study presented at the International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks showed that small-business networks are attacked every 39 seconds by some type of hacker or malicious software. Thankfully, having the proper firewall and office network security tools can prevent even the most determined cyber hacker from getting his hands on your network. Are your systems covered?

Does your organization have someone looking after the network who knows what they’re doing? Or is the IT position assigned to the so-called “Accidental IT Person” – an ad hoc position taken on by whoever knows the most about computers? The danger of not being able to prevent downtime here is that if this person has a full-time job, perhaps as the office manager, or graphic designer, they won’t necessarily be keeping everything locked down and updated.

A good way to prevent downtime is to have a dedicated IT person on staff, or outsource the task to a local computer service company. By leveraging an IT services provider, you will have access to a team of qualified experts.

Solve E-mail Problems And Save Money With Hosted Microsoft Exchange

August 26, 2019June 30, 2016 by techprognosis

How Hosted Exchange Can Solve All Your E-mail Problems While Saving You BIG Money

If you are a small to medium sized business that has frequent e-mail problems including servers going down, slow performance, too many spam e-mails and high IT support and software costs, read on.

Hosted Microsoft Exchange email service is often a much cheaper and easier way of getting rid of all these issues at a much lower cost to your company. Here’s how it works: Instead of you purchasing and maintaining your e-mail service in-house, which can be costly and time consuming, your Exchange server is hosted (and maintained) in a high-performance, high-security hosting company “in the cloud” where you can access it securely from any device or PC.

Best of all, you don’t have to make any changes in HOW you access your e-mail – your messages will simply be delivered to your inbox, phone, or other device faster and with fewer issues, and it will always be synchronized and up-to-date!

Here are just a few of the advantages:

How Managed IT Services and Cloud Computing Improve Your Business

October 12, 2018June 20, 2014 by Daniel Ihonvbere

Small business owners who are not already on board the “cloud” may be missing out on a great opportunity to improve their business operations as well as profitability. Cloud computing has changed the landscape of business dramatically in the past few years. In order to reap the most rewards from technological advances, it is important … Read more

Mobile App Permissions: Are Users Really the Problem?

January 8, 2017March 30, 2013 by Daniel Ihonvbere

While there have been a lot of news-worthy events in the past couple of years involving corporate breaches, one thing has not changed. Users are still considered the greatest obstacle to information security. Whether it is phishing, opening infected attachments, or “just being stupid and lazy”.

Our focus in this article will be on the “stupid and lazy” part of this equation. We will take a quick look at the way users tackle mobile app permissions in the android market place otherwise known as Google Play. A cursory look at some apps on Google Play and the permissions required by these apps, and the ratings given by users, even to apps with seemingly over-reaching or meaningless permissions, explains a lot about why security will continue to be a problem for a very long time.