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Windows 8 Offers Users Enhanced Security Features

by Jeremy Miller, Technician
Windows has been known as a trustworthy computing platform, a lot of which is due to the ability to secure your operating system without infringing upon availability.

Microsoft has once again improved security across all versions of Windows 8. Just as in earlier releases, this version of Windows improves user and network security.

All versions of Windows will have many new security features such as:

UEFI Secure Boot support which is a large hardware step toward mitigating malware, specifically rootkits and bootkits. Rootkits and bootkits are low-level malware that run as your operating system starts up.

Organizations that deploy Windows 8 will want this feature enabled and prevent users from disabling this feature.

Smart Screen Filter which has already made its debut in Internet Explorer. Microsoft has decided to implement it into the operating system itself.

Smart Screen Filtering has been proven to be the best at blocking socially-engineered malware, which are phishing and pharming attacks such as bad links or redirects to bad or look-a-like sites.

This can aide in the prevention of drive-by downloads as well, which is where you unknowingly download malware by visiting websites.

Integrated anti-malware and Windows Defender is included in all Windows 8 versions. Windows defender will incorporate anti-virus from Microsoft Security Essentials with improved performance and a smaller footprint.

This can all be implemented alongside your current anti-virus provider’s anti-virus and should be implemented as soon as you obtain your computer, this way you are starting from a known-good environment.

Picture Passwords have been added to all versions of Windows 8 as well. Picture Password is a touch-based secure login. You select a picture and then create a gesture-sequence on top of the picture. These can simplify the login process while making it more difficult to hack.

Windows Reader is something completely new to Windows 8. Windows will now be able to read PDF documents without having to install 3rd party software. This can mitigate the popular PDF vulnerabilities. The more software you have installed the more vulnerable you become.

Address Space Layout Randomization was introduced in Windows Vista and has been improved upon since. This can aide in the prevention of the “buffer overflow” attacks that are gaining popularity. They have added integrity checks, and an Enhanced protected mode “Sandbox”

Windows 8 Professional has additional security features to the one listed below such as: Bitlocker and Bitlocker Togo, which are not new but have been improved upon. The same goes for Group Policy Objects.

Windows 8 Enterprise has additional security features such as: Applocker which was introduced in Windows 7 and gives the user the ability to white-list or blacklist applications.

Direct access is an alternative to VPN’s, and finally “Windows to Go”, which allows people to image your computers with a Windows 8 corporate image.

It can be put on a USB and loaded onto any 64-bit PC and can include all of the management features.

If you need assistance or help with any of the new features of Windows 8 please contact us for assistance.

We can even setup your new computers for first-time use and transfer any data from your old computer to your new Windows 8 computer.

What Your Company Can Do To Cook Up New Ideas

Most companies recognize that innovation and creativity are vital to their survival, but they don’t know how to plan projects that will bring the quantum leaps they’re looking for.

Design specialist Heather M. A. Fraser, in her book Design Works (Rotman-UTP Publishing), describes three essentials every business needs to generate productive innovation:

Empathy
To create products or improve services, you need to understand what your customers (or even your employees) want.

They won’t always tell you; sometimes they don’t know themselves. That means you’ve got to develop your knowledge from the inside out.

Learn everything you can about their business needs, their personal goals, their failures, and their successes, regardless of whether any of those data seem to apply to your areas of expertise at first.

What you collect can lead your organization’s imagination in unexpected directions. Before the introduction of the iPod, for example, few people realized they wanted “a thousand songs in their pocket.”

Visualization
Take what you’ve learned and add it to what your organization can do.

Brainstorm as many ideas as you can, in practical terms but without limiting yourself to what’s easy or what you’ve done before. Combine ideas and concepts that don’t obviously go together, and look for ways to maximize your strengths—always with an eye on what your customers really want.

Strategy
This is where innovation can bog down unless you’re careful to select ideas that fit with your overall business objectives and strategy. Some companies pursue too many promising ideas at once, never perfecting any of them. Others design a great new product that doesn’t apply to their market and that they don’t know how to sell.

Be creative, but be rigorous in your analysis of what the market needs and what you’re capable of delivering. Then get to work.

Healthy Aging Tips From WebMD

A recent poll of centenarians, grouped with people who are over 65, conducted by WebMD found that there were a number of tips that they believed were very important to aging in a healthy manner and maintaining a youthful outlook on life.

One of those tips is to maintain strong relationships with family and friends, and another is to keep learning new things throughout your life and ensure that your mind stays active in the process.

Centenarians also believe that it is important to maintain a sense of humor and laugh a lot as well as to look forward to each and every new day with a sense of optimism and purpose.

Exercising, keeping moving and staying active were also viewed as vital, as were making healthy nutritional choices in terms of food consumption, keeping up with the latest news and current events, and maintaining a sense of independence.

This Thanksgiving, Pass The “Storytelling Fork”

Thomas Fox is president of Tech Experts, southeast Michigan’s leading small business computer support company.

Plan on getting together with friends and family this Thanksgiving? Then pass the “storytelling fork” and you’ll create incredible memories that no one will forget!

This tradition is a variation of the “talking stick,” which is an old Native American tradition used in council circles to give everyone a chance to speak.

When matters of great concern came before the council, the leading elder would hold the talking stick and begin the discussion. When he finished, he would hold out the talking stick, and whoever wished to speak after him would take it.

In this manner, the stick was passed from one individual to another until all who wished to speak had done so.

The stick was then passed back to the leading elder for safe keeping. They believe that whomever holds the stick is imparted with the sacred power of words.

So how can you use this as a fun Thanksgiving tradition for your family?

Before everyone leaves the dinner table, bring out your “storytelling fork” and request that everyone tell a story as a small payment for the meal they’ve just enjoyed.

To make it fun, tie a red ribbon around a silver serving fork and hold it up for everyone to see.

Say, “This is a magic Thanksgiving fork. Although it seems like an ordinary serving fork, it has special powers that will imbue the holder with amazing storytelling ability. When you hold this fork, memories and fun stories of people and places you’ve seen will come flooding into your mind. When you hold this fork, everyone will listen.”

Start by giving them a story of your own. Maybe you can talk about the day your children were born. Tell stories of your childhood or previous Thanksgiving meals.

Talk about how you met your spouse or an old friend, teacher, or mentor who had a big impact on your life.

Or talk about the funny habits or quirks of family members who have passed away. Then, pass the fork for others to do the same.

Kids will love the attention they get when telling a story, and you’ll have several memories that will last forever!

Choosing A New Printer For Your Office

By Tech Experts Staff
When it comes to the type of printer you use for your everyday printing needs the choice seems pretty simple doesn’t it? That may not be the case at all…

With hundreds of different printers, brands, etc. the task of finding the right kind of printer that will suit your company’s needs can be more difficult than expected.

So what should be taken into consideration when looking to buy a new printer?

Some important points to consider: Size, cost, cost to maintain, type of ink, functionality needed, and finally speed.

While most everyone can agree with the statement “you get what you pay for” that tends to hold true with printers as well.

The problem with using this sentiment as your sole deciding factor when it comes to the type of printer you need is that you can end up with a printer that is WAY too big for your company and your needs.

Many different manufacturers make copy machines that are very large. For most small businesses, a large copier is overkill.

A nice Multi-Function printer will work just fine, and save you quite a bit.

So the second thing to consider is cost. Buying a printer that doesn’t cost much generally means it’s made of inferior parts and will wear out sooner than one that would have cost a bit more money.

Cost largely determines the feature set available on a printer. Take for instance Ink Jet printers versus Laser Jet printers. Ink Jet printers are much cheaper but tend to wear out long before a Laser printer would.

While considering the cost of the printer itself it would be good to consider the cost of the cartridge as well as other maintenance items.

Some higher end printers have the ability to have maintenance kits installed; the benefit to this is that these printers tend to be able to outperform cheaper printers.

Being able to replace easily worn parts keeps a printer running well for a number of years.

What type of cartridge is best or most cost effective?

This really comes down to what the printer will be used for.

For general home users using an Ink Jet printer may be fine, and cartridges for these types of printers are much cheaper as well.

If the printer is for a business or someone that does a lot of printing, then a printer that takes toner cartridges would be a better choice.Printer functionality is a huge point to consider.

What is needed by the device? Does it just need to be able to print black and white images or are color images necessary as well? Does the printer need to be able to receive faxes? Make copies?

All are valid, important questions when considering the type of printer needed.

The final point to consider is speed. If a company needs a large amount of documents printed at one time by many different users it would be a good idea to consider a printer with a high PPM (pages per minute) rate.

Still confused what would suit your needs? Give us a call and we can get you a quote on a printer that works well for your business.

Secure Online Accounts Without Sacrificing Ease Of Use

by Jeremy Miller, Technician
The Internet allows us to do so much, such as: buy things, research information, and share just about anything. There is and will always be someone out there that is going to take advantage of Internet users in one way or another.

Keeping that in mind, most places on the Internet use password authentication, this is both good and bad. It is good because you are required to enter credentials that you originally provided to enter a protected area of a website.

This may keep your data safe from most people with malicious intent. However, most people are not perfect at remembering passwords, especially complex passwords, so most people end up using the same password for many websites. This is a bad choice.

If a hacker obtains your password, they may be able to access any site on which you use that password or a similar password. The best Internet practices are to use a different complex password for each website.

Complex passwords are passwords that contain upper and lower case letters, numbers, special characters, and they must not resemble any dictionary word.

An example of a bad password is: love, password, P@ssw0rd. A good example of a complex password would be: ”n$)M1@x{1_5” 65”.

Password cracking has come a long way from brute-force dictionary based attacks, which allow a hacker to guess your password using a computer and wordlists. The use of complex passwords has become a necessity for anyone wanting to keep their information secure.

The best way to solve this conundrum is to implement a password manager. I have tried many password managers and have found the best results to be with LassPass password manager.

It is a feature rich password manager that is very secure. LassPass does not store or even know what your password is.

You can add LassPass as a browser extension or an app on your computers or mobile devices. You will only have to remember your password to LassPass to access any password protected websites.

Once LassPass is installed you simply visit a website that requires a login, such as your webmail or Facebook. Once you enter your username and password LassPass will ask if you would like to remember it.

If you choose yes it will auto fill out the information required to automatically login to the website the next time you visit it.

LassPass can also store secure encrypted notes that work great for bank logins. Most banks have a multi-stage login which is where you enter your username and password on different pages.

You can store your usernames, passwords, account numbers, and card numbers in secure notes for ease of access. All of your passwords can be accessed from any platform and any device.

LassPass also provides users with many tools that make using the LassPass password manager better such as: password generators, automatic form filling with the ability to have multiple identities, easily backup the data to local storage, on-screen keyboard to prevent key loggers, ability to share information via email, and most importantly two-factor authentication.

A two–factor authentication device allows you to use a password and a device such as a USB flash drive, YubiKey©, or Google Authenticator App to authenticate.

This improves your security because you have to have the second credential. Since that is in your possession, a cyber criminal would have to actually steal your device to hack your passwords.

Once you start to use LassPass as a password manager you will not want to return to remembering passwords or creating weak password that are easy to remember.

Give us a call to talk about improved security for your online accounts. We can help you setup the password manager and teach you how to use it. This is another way to make sure that your identity does not get compromised.

Timely Tips For Social Networking Safety

Social networking websites like MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, and Windows Live Spaces are services people can use to connect with others to share information like photos, videos, and personal messages.

As the popularity of these social sites grows, so do the risks of using them. Hackers, spammers, virus writers, identity thieves, and other criminals follow the traffic.

Read these tips to help protect yourself when you use social networks.

Be wary of links
Use caution when you click links that you receive in messages from your friends on your social website. Treat links in messages on these sites as you would links in email messages.

Post judiciously
Know what you’ve posted about yourself. A common way that hackers break into financial or other accounts is by clicking the “Forgot your password?” link on the account login page.

To break into your account, they search for the answers to your security questions, such as your birthday, home town, high school class, or mother’s middle name. If the site allows, make up your own password questions, and don’t draw them from material anyone could find with a quick search.

Watch out for a friend’s hacked email
Don’t trust that a message is really from who it says it’s from. Hackers can break into accounts and send messages that look like they’re from your friends, but aren’t. If you suspect that a message is fraudulent, use an alternate method to contact your friend to find out. This includes invitations to join new social networks. For more information, see Scammers exploit Facebook friendships.

Protect your address book
To avoid giving away email addresses of your friends, do not allow social networking services to scan your email address book.

When you join a new social network, you might receive an offer to enter your email address and password to find out if your contacts are on the network. The site might use this information to send email messages to everyone in your contact list or even everyone you’ve ever sent an email message to with that email address.

Don’t friend everyone
Be selective about who you accept as a friend on a social network. Identity thieves might create fake profiles in order to get information from you.

Choose your social network carefully. Evaluate the site that you plan to use and make sure you understand the privacy policy. Find out if the site monitors content that people post. You will be providing personal information to this website, so use the same criteria that you would to select a site where you enter your credit card.

Posting is permanent
Assume that everything you put on a social networking site is permanent. Even if you can delete your account, anyone on the Internet can easily print photos or text or save images and videos to a computer. And don’t forget, Google caches!

Avoid apps and games
Be careful about installing extras on your site. Many social networking sites allow you to download third-party applications that let you do more with your personal page. Criminals sometimes use these applications to steal your personal information.

To download and use third-party applications safely, take the same safety precautions that you take with any other program or file you download from the web.

Ghosts, Goblins And Failed Backups… Oh, My!

Thomas Fox is president of Tech Experts, southeast Michigan’s leading small business computer support company.

Welcome to October, fourth quarter, and Halloween!

The season of ghosts, ghouls and other scary creatures is the perfect time to talk about another frightening subject: The state of your backups!

First, the facts:

  • 6 percent of all PCs will suffer some sort of data loss each year.
  • Every week, 140,000 hard drives crash.
  • Simple drive recovery can cost more than $7,500.
  • More than 600,000 laptops are lost or stolen each year.

Scary Statistics
These are pretty scary numbers, particularly if you use your laptop for business. My experience has been that, while most business owners understand the importance of backing up their server, many forget about the data stored in email, on local PCs or laptops and flash drives.
The cost to replace a laptop pales in comparison to the effects the lost data can have on your business.

Whether it’s theft, a natural disaster, fire, flood, theft, or human error, any loss of important business data can be debilitating to your business if you’re not prepared for them.

Fortunately, there are three easy steps you can take to protect your business from the downtime and data loss that can result from a disastrous event.

Choose the right backup provider
Make sure that your backup system can provide you with both offsite and onsite backup, with an option to be back up and running within 24-48 hours. This is what our Experts Total Backup service is designed to do.

Keep in mind that many low-cost solutions require days or even weeks for full recovery of your files, due to the slowness of the Internet.

Your backup solution should not only protect your data, but should also give you a backup of your programs and network settings so your business operations can return to normal as quickly as possible.

Conduct a “fire drill”
You also want to be sure that you conduct a periodic “fire-drill” with your backup. Too many times, we see clients who religiously change tapes, but never check their content. When disaster strikes, we discover the tapes are blank. That’s why we’ve gotten rid of tape based backups.

Keep your backup current
Finally, whenever you add computers, new software, or new services to your network, be sure your backup solution reflects those changes. This will ensure that you are backing up everything you need.

Free Report
Business backups are complex, and require a professional solution. I’ve put together a free, 12 page report that covers all of these items – and more – that is your’s free for the asking. Just give me a call!

Local, Offsite Or Disaster Recovery: Backup Options Explained

By Tech Experts Staff
Many businesses have a lot of highly important data. A sudden, catastrophic loss of data has proven to put many businesses out of business within months of the data loss.

The extreme costs of both getting data back, if it’s even possible, and the expense of down time and lost business is an insurmountable obstacle to business continuity.

Thankfully, we have many options to proactively prevent data loss and in some cases, keep your business up and running when your original source of data is no longer accessible. With our Experts Total Backup service we’ve got your data covered.

Choosing the right backup option depends on the type of data your organization has, the amount of time that is acceptable to be without access to your data, and the amount of time you need to retain backups of your data.

For small to medium sized businesses, we offer a file based backup system that comes in several tiers.

The various tiers are based on not only the amount of data you have to backup but also on the type of data you need backed up.

For instance, if a business runs around the clock or routinely has files open at all hours, has SQL or other databases running, or the high likelihood of having files open during the backup jobs, we have a backup system that can backup these files, even though they are open, offsite to our secure offsite backup server.

So, what if your business can’t be down for any period of time, even if your building were to burn down?

For situations like this, we offer Backup and Disaster Recovery options.

A Backup and Disaster Recovery machine or BDR, is designed to take continuous snapshots or your server as well as upload this data to a cloud based server.

There are many benefits of having a BDR in place versus just having a standard backup job in place.
The first major advantage is that in the event of something catastrophic like a business being demolished (fire, flood, tornado) access to the server can be quickly restored via the images the BDR uploaded to the offsite server.

What this means is that even servers running applications, databases, etc. can still be completely accessible even if the original equipment was destroyed.

After the equipment has been replaced this image of the server that you have been using via our secure cloud environment can then be transferred to the new server.

This allows you to continue to function as a business, using your original data, while we work to setup a new server onsite for your business.

Planning on replacing an old server soon? We have backup solutions that can be included for onsite backups as well when a server is purchased through us.

Using Windows Server 2008, we can configure onsite image based backups that allow your servers image to be restored to another server in the event your server fails and cannot be used again.

If you need help sorting out the options, give us a call and we can go over your current backup solution to make sure you’re protected.

We’ll help you develop an appropriate backup solution to protect your data and ease your mind. Remember: Neglecting your backups is extremely risky!

Is Hosted Exchange A Good Idea For Your Business?

by Jeremy Miller, Technician
Email has become as important as any other utility to most businesses. So obviously, company owners will want to avoid interruptions at the lowest price possible.

For small to medium sized businesses, our Hosted Exchange service is the best option.

You only have to pay a flat per-user fee. This takes the hassle away from having a server on-site that has to be maintained and updated.

With Hosted Exchange, you don’t have to worry about your email data.

The facilities that house the Exchange server clusters are managed by Microsoft – the company that invented Exchange!

This can benefit you by having a very high uptime percentage, secure email backups, and synced data on all of your devices.

The cost of using Hosted Exchange compares favorably to having an onsite email server.

If your company has a relatively small number of email users, the savings can be as much as 90 percent.

However, even at 100 or more users, Hosted Exchange can reduce your costs by as much as 50 percent.

Hosted Exchange facilities always use third party backup support, which protects your email data from any foreseeable disaster.

This is great because, even if the facility was completely destroyed you will not experience a service interruption. This is possible because you will be able to use your email from the off-site backup location.

If your business begins to grow, your email will be able to expand to meet your needs. Using Hosted Exchange will minimize the impact on your internal network.

This will free up local bandwidth for server/client transactions. If you want to upgrade to a newer version or migrate to a new computer, the process will be easy and painless.

Exchange does more than just email. It is also a calendar and a contact list.

With Hosted Exchange all of your meetings can be shared with other members of your company. You’re also able to create contact lists that you can share with others.

Users will be able to access Exchange from almost any device, such as: Computers, smart phones, and tablets. Even though Exchange is a Microsoft product, users will be able to access it on a Mac.

The default Mail, iCal, and Address Book have had Exchange support since 2009.

However Microsoft developed Entourage to be very similar to Outlook.

This has a lot more functionality than the default mail apps, and was designed to interface with Exchange.

Also users can access their email from any machine that can use a web browser thanks to Outlook Web Access which is included with all Exchange mailboxes.With Outlook Web Access, you log into the Exchange system, and then use an interface that looks just like Outlook to manage your email.

If your company is email dependent, we’d love to talk to you about Hosted Exchange and the benefits to your business. Give the office a call at (734) 457-5001, or email us at info@MyTechExperts.com. And yes, that goes to our Exchange system!