As systems and market demands continue to require better productivity and efficiency, it only follows that the software that businesses use also needs to upgrade sooner or later. Such is the case with Windows XP, which Microsoft will stop issuing support for in 2014.

Part of using any sort of software is the inevitable need to upgrade. Most if not all software needs to either be replaced and upgraded as the demands of the market entail more efficient processing of the various data and information a business handles.

Such is the case with Windows XP. While many continue to use this proven straightforward operating system, Microsoft has decided to stop support by the year 2014. Microsoft further recommends upgrading to its latest OS, Windows 7, in order for users to continue to receive OS support.

While there are some lines of business applications that have not been upgraded to work with Windows 7, most have — and there are alternative approaches. Also, your business needs the security and protection that only a current, up-to-date operating system can provide.

We understand that changing your OS will entail some expense, including new licenses, hardware, and some training. Fortunately, these things are designed to help you operate more efficiently and increase your productivity in the long run. But such change will take time, and if you are interested in starting to plan for an upgrade now, we’ll be happy to sit down with you and develop an upgrade process that meets your specific needs.

A recent attack by cyber-criminals has highlighted the need for many SMBs to re-evaluate the security protocols between themselves and their bank. Hackers exploit weaknesses in such systems, and when successful, can siphon tens of thousands of dollars from your accounts.

In a recent attack, cyber-thieves managed to get away with $63,000 after they exploited vulnerabilities in the online payroll system of a small business with its bank.

First, the crooks managed to infiltrate the company’s system through a piece of malware called the Zeus Trojan. This gave them access to the company’s data, including the password and username used in transacting with the company’s bank. The thieves then created several new ghost employees and created payroll accounts for them, which they sent to the bank and authenticated using the company controller’s username and password. And to cover their tracks, the hackers erased the confirmation emails regarding the transaction.

This incident highlights the need for better security systems in both the business and their bank – as security experts cite online banking transactions as one of the favorite targets of cyber-criminals. Cyber-attacks such as this one exploit weaknesses in many existing systems that rely on very simple and automated authentication procedures to confirm transactions.

A direct threat to your business finances is not something to be taken lightly. You not only need to review your current online banking system, but also the current security protocols you have installed, since hackers and cyber-criminals are constantly updating Trojans and other malware to adapt to changing IT protection systems.

We encourage you to have us take a look at the systems you have in place to determine if you are at risk for attacks like these. Please do not hesitate to contact us and we will be happy to draw up custom security solutions that address your specific needs.

References:
Sold a Lemon in Internet Banking
Cybercrooks Drive Away With $63,000 from Car Dealership

With hackers and electronic thieves constantly on the lookout for the latest exploits and security breaches they can take advantage of, it is comforting to know that there are also people behind bold initiatives to make our web experiences much safer.

If you think hackers are the only ones doing their research to release newer and scarier viruses and malware on the web, think again. It is comforting to know that there are also very capable people doing what they can to make the internet a safer place – like Professor Dawn Song, associate professor at the University of California at Berkeley and MacArthur Foundation fellow.

In a nutshell, Professor Song has been looking at different ways to make the internet experience more secure. Her two initiatives – WebBlaze and BitBlaze – are aimed toward developers who want to create better and much more secure programs and applications.

WebBlaze is a compilation of different strategies from Song and other like minds who tackle different problems and solutions in all sorts of platforms, and BitBlaze is an analysis tool for malicious software. While we won’t go into too much detail (it involves very complicated math), the gist is that Song and her colleagues are drawing up some very solid solutions to constantly evolving security issues on the web.

It’s exciting to see developments like these in the security industry. As threats continue to evolve, so does the means through which they are fought. The more we use the internet and the more the online experience becomes integral to the day-to-day operations of businesses big and small, the more important securing your data and information becomes. And because of efforts such as Professor Song’s, we can expect security programs to be much more effective and efficient as time passes.

Know more about BitBlaze and WebBlaze

Learn more about Dawn Song here

If you are looking to assess and beef up your security systems, we’d be happy to sit down with you and take a look at improvements that can make your business and your data much more secure.

What if there was a way to save your business money while also making it run more efficiently? With cloud computing, you can achieve just that. Cloud computing, one of the biggest trends in the IT industry today, lets clients access and share their documents, files and shortcuts with coworkers in one easy, unified online system — now you can have a webtop instead of a desktop. And Nerds Support, a Miami-based local IT consulting company, is proud to be one of the first in South Florida to offer these cost-effective solutions.

Using Nerds Support’s Graphical User Interface, users log in and have instant access to their personal and shared files from practically anywhere: in the office, at home or on the road. Because cloud services are hosted and maintained by Nerds Support, small business owners do not need to worry about maintenance as the business grows; cloud services are customizable and scalable to suit your company’s needs.

Best of all, Nerds Support’s GUI is easily accessible from any mobile device. Stuck at the airport? Halfway across the world? No need to worry. For business professionals who are always on the road, your files are a click away on your laptop, netbook, Mac or iPad. Who says you can’t have it all? Scott the owner of Nerds Support shared “All our clients have been impressed with this technology and the ones who now use it regularly are wondering how they ever did without it.”

According to the International Data Corporation, a market research and analysis firm, 15 percent of IT spending will be related to cloud computing. It’s no surprise: the advantages of cloud computing for a small business ultimately help its bottom line. For more details on cloud computing as well as a video demonstration on how cloud computing can work for your business, visit the Nerds Support’s Cloud Services site at http://www.nerdssupport.com/it-services-solutions-miami/cloud-services-computer-services-miami/

Don’t Get Hacked!
Password policy and why.

On average people are using the same password for every account that they have. If you have a “weak” password, using scripts and dictionaries a hacker is able to “crack” your password within days.

These would be the most common passwords used that can be cracked within several minutes due to their statistically high use.

1. Your partner, child, or pet’s name, possibly followed by a 0 or 1 (because they’re always making you use a number, aren’t they?)
2. The last 4 digits of your social security number.
3. 123 or 1234 or 123456.
4. “password” or variant “p@ssw0rd”
5. Your city, or college, football team name.
6. Date of birth – yours, your partner’s or your child’s.
7. “god”
8. “letmein”
9. “money”
10. “love”

A good technique is using upper and lower case letters in order to reduce the possibility of your password being compromised. Users should also use no less than 8 characters and 1 symbol. This will make it extremely difficult to crack.

Pay particular attention to the difference between using only lowercase characters and using all possible characters (uppercase, lowercase, and special characters). Adding just a capital letter and a asterisk would change the processing time for an 8 character password from 2.4 days to 2.1 centuries.

These are just averages from a standard home computer. The averages also assumes that the hacker is not using a word dictionary to crack your password.

If supercomputers were put into play, they would finish about 1,000 times faster.

So after reading this and absorbing the information. Ask yourself one question “Are you secure from Piracy?”

PRLog (Press Release) – Jan 28, 2011 – In three days the winner of the Nerds Support Appreciation Month contest will be announced. On January 11th Nerds Support launched their Facebook Fan Appreciation Month. This month has been a part of larger overall company goal to become more relevant in their community through giving back and promoting non-profits. Nerds Support has been doing this by each month selecting one of their clients as the client of the month and then asking the client which non-profit they would like to have Nerds Support make a donation to on their behalf. They then promote the charity by sending information to hundreds of subscribers of their Nerds Support newsletter.

In January, Nerds Support set off to take this same concept to all its fans and wanted to get them engaged in this journey of philanthropy so they launched a friendly competition on Facebook. In order to get increased engagement from Nerd Support fans we asked the question. “What is your favorite charity?” Fans that responded and gave their input would be entered into the contest. The rules to the contest were very simple. First, you become a Fan of Nerds Support (http://www.facebook.com/nerdssupport). Second, you post your favorite charity on the wall and then suggest to your friends to “Like” the post. In order for your friends to do this then they would also have to be a fan of the Nerds Support page. Everyone is allowed to post only once a day and once a week the “Likes” are tallied and an update given on the Nerds Support page. The Nerds Support Fan Appreciation competition will be running until the end of January. At that time a final tally will be made and the two winning charities plus the two winning individuals will be announced.

From January 11 to January 28th the Nerds Support fan pages has experienced a 1,027% increase of New Likes, 93% increase in post views and 2,627% increase in post feedback. “This is unprecedented growth and the best part about it is that we are impacting our community as a result of this” shares Nerds Support Marketing Manager, Jeff Zelaya.

Owner of Nerds Support, Scott Richman says “The feedback from clients and the non profits has all been positive. Some of the non profits that we’ve made donations to have been the South Florida Leukemia & Lymphoma Society in November and 4Kids of South Florida in December.”

As a result of this competition the traffic to their main website http://www.NerdsSupport.com has spiked and they have now even created a community involvement pages that fans can continue to keep track of Nerds Support’s “Journey of Philanthropy” project. Scott Richman emphasizes that “Originally the main goal of this competition wasn’t to increase our Facebook fans but it was to raise awareness for the importance of volunteering and giving back to the community. The results of this campaign have proven that there could be winners on all sides. The client wins, the community wins and the company wins”.

Click Here To Become a Fan of 4Kids of South Florida

Yesterday we celebrated the life and legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. This day has officially been billed as the National Day of Service. People all over America volunteered at animal shelters, soup kitchens and cleanup projects.  I want to take this moment and share with you two great organizations that you should take a closer look at.

The first one is Employed by My Vision Inc. (EBMV) a non-profit organization that emphasizes the great need for leadership and purpose in our society, in places such as high schools, universities, and community centers. Through EBMV’s dynamic public speaking engagements, workshops, and programs, they plan to strategically impact the lives of those they come in contact with, challenging them to reach their full potential. I urge you to learn more about them and get involved in this movement: http://www.ebmvision.com/

The second one is Ambitious Kids they are a non-profit that provide resources to the public in regards to educational challenges confronted by children (k-12) who are considered at-risk for educational failure. They also partner with individuals and organizations within the community who promote education, and community service to maximize their outreach. You can read more about them at: http://www.ambitiouskids.org/

These are just two of the great organizations that Nerds Support has found out more about since we launched our Fan Appreciation month. If you have a particular charity that you feel passionate about it is not too late to post them on our wall and get your friends to “Like” it. The non-profit with the most LIKES will win a donation and be featured in Nerds Support’s upcoming newsletter that goes out to thousands in our community.

Good luck to everyone and let me leave you with one of our favorite Dr. King quotes:

“Everybody can be great, because anybody can serve. You don’t have to have a college degree to serve. You don’t have to make your subject and verb agree to serve. You only need a heart full of grace. A soul generated by love.”

$500 billion — it’s a number so big you’d assume it’s a component of the national debt. It isn’t. Instead, it’s what Gartner analyst Andy Kyte calls the IT debt. “When budgets are tight, maintenance gets cut. After a decade of tight budgets, the scale of the maintenance backlog has created systemic risk, particularly for large organizations,” he says.

The “debt” really has two major components: One is underfunding and even neglect of routine but important hardware replacement purchases and software upgrades. The other is the slow degradation of enterprise applications.

On the most obvious level, managers like Steve Davidek, the system administrator for the city of Sparks, Nev., scrambles to keep systems up and running with budgets that barely covered the basics. Sparks, with a population of about 88,000, was hit hard by the recession, and when it came time to trim services, the IT department was in the cross-hairs, losing 6 of its 14 full-time employees.

“It’s been a Band-Aid approach, and the people we support are on the verge of not getting what they need,” he says. When money does flow, Davidek says, he hopes to complete the virtualization of servers in the data center, a key task that was just half done during the recession.

Choices made by IT have also contributed to the “debt.” Mundane “run the business” expenses are taking a backseat to initiatives, particularly cloud computing, that management hopes will save money in the not-too-distant future, says Harcharan Sing Rajpal, head of Tata’s IT application services consultancy for North America.

The second leg of the “IT debt” monster has to do with aging enterprise applications. In reality, these apps are collections of data and business logic encapsulated in programming instructions and myriad platform components, such as operating systems, databases, hardware, and network infrastructure, Kyte says. As they age, these apps are “inevitably diverging from an ideal state toward a suboptimal state, and potentially toward obsolescence or failure.”

In normal times, maintenance would slow the decay, “but such investments can be tough to justify in a tight economy when precious investment funds need to be used to deliver short-term, visible business benefits,” Kyte says. Even if the current version of an application is running well, the next upgrade for many applications is going to involve a substantial shift in the underlying platform infrastructure.

It would be easy to dismiss Kyte’s analysis by claiming IT always wants more. But he says this time, it’s different: “While it is true that there has never been an IT organization without a backlog of maintenance activity, the scale of the problem is significantly greater than it has ever been. It is not unreasonable to suggest that the maintenance backlog — and, therefore, the ‘IT debt’ — was probably at an all-time low on 31 December 1999, when every IT organization had spent a significant amount of money upgrading or replacing systems in order to deal with Y2K.

“Since then, however, the demands for IT investment to deliver real business value through running, growing, or transforming the business have drained the maintenance coffers year after year, so year after year the IT debt has grown,” Kyte says.

Is that $500 billion number too high? Kyte says he derived it by analyzing several large Gartner clients that generally do a good job of keeping applications up to date. That led him to estimate that a typical Fortune 2000 company would require upgrades costing more than $200 million each.

305-551-2009

Don’t use the Band-Aid approach. Call us today and let Nerds Support help you before the ticking bomb explodes.

With the growth of social networking, it is becoming increasingly difficult to separate business connections with personal connections.

November 17, 2010 was declared by Jimmy Kimmel during his television show as “National Unfriend Day”, the opportunity for all Facebook users to declutter their Facebook pages by “unfriending” people in their friends’ lists. He claims that Facebook has been “cheapening” the idea of friendship. To many the idea was hilarious, but others are seriously considering the wisdom of unfriending.

Is Kimmel on to something here? Can unfriending benefit your online business?

Research shows that as social media gets bigger, we’re getting smaller. Brian Wong, a network marketer says it simply: “With the growth of social networking, I am finding it increasingly difficult to separate business connections and personal connections.” He says that having almost 1,000 friends on Facebook has made it difficult for him to see the feeds and updates of his “real” friends and important business partners.

Lately there is a growing trend of de-scaling on the internet. People have started “pruning” their social lives online. For example, the popular Farmville app lost 30 million players this year, and people are beginning to realize that conversations and comments are more important than a huge number of blog hits.

So how can de-scaling and unfriending help your business? The drive to be more intimate can benefit your business by allowing you to form a tighter circle of customers, more successfully establishing you as a preferred channel for consumption.

Luckily, there are tools that can help you descale your social networks:

1. Path – Offers small-scale communities where people feel more comfortable sharing personal information. It controls who can view your information and does not include features that make your content viral.
2. Letter.ly – A subscription-based newsletter for bloggers who feel that public posts decrease the quality of conversations. This newsletter opens discussion only to people who pay, or who are privately invited to read a blog post.
3. GroupMe – A texting app which limits your group text participants to only 14, to ensure that meaningful dialogues take place.

What about the flip side of unfriending and descaling? While you’re considering who to eliminate from your social circles, your contacts are likely doing the same. Here are some tips to help you make their cuts:

1.       Be selective in your communications.
Of course, your product is important – to you. But not every little detail is as important to your audience. Be sure to focus on key features and benefits from your audience’s perspective.

2.       Stay on topic.
Always give relevant communications to your customers, and never rant or badmouth competitors. This is a sure way to lose customers.

3.       Provide value.
In addition to talking about your product or service, find ways to provide value to your circle of friends. Understand topics and pain points important to them, and provide valuable information and advice to help them succeed. You’ll soon come to be considered as a valuable resource to your contacts – one that they want to keep in their online social groups.

One thing is clear: quality is still more important than quantity, especially in the current economic downturn when people are downsizing everything. Start “pruning” your social network – and take steps to avoid being pruned – and you’ll reap the benefits of having a tight circle of loyal friends and customers.