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With electronic payments now outnumbering cash transactions, the Point-of-sale (PoS) system hack is becoming a more common in the world of cyber crime. In recent years, there have been several high profile cases including the notorious $10 million Subway PoS breach, where at least 150 franchises were targeted, as well as the breach of Barnes & Noble, where credit card readers in 63 stores were compromised. Almost all modern businesses now make use of an electronic PoS systems, and with the hacking of these devices on the increase, it is more important than ever to take appropriate steps to secure your customers’ data.

A company’s network is one of its most valuable components, not only because of its necessity to the health of operations, but because of its vitality to sustaining business-client relationships through business continuity. One of the most common errors business owners make in terms of IT strategy is to take a reactive approach rather than a proactive approach when it comes to network monitoring. A reactive approach can promote costly downtime, expensive urgent break-fix technical consulting, and often more serious problems such as virus and malware attacks, hacking, and data loss. A good network monitoring system is beneficial to any business, however if your network displays any of the following warning signs, you should consider implementing a monitoring system right away:

On July 9th, 2012, the Internet was supposed to hit doomsday. Millions of machines worldwide were expected to no longer have access to the Internet resulting in huge losses to businesses and swamped ISP helpdesks. 

Origins

The threat of malware is one that is increasing year after year, and has been doing so steadily. Scams of one sort or another are increasingly being seen on social networking sites and mobile application markets. As ever, you can reduce the risks to yourself by deploying anti-virus programs and keeping them up to date. Their ability to detect suspicious activity has been getting better and better as heuristics improve.

IT security specialists working with small and medium-sized businesses are well aware of the potential pitfalls of a BYOD approach to provisioning employees with mobile handsets and tablets. The need for such awareness was underlined this month by news that the Apple App Store's efforts to keep out malware did not managed to stop an app known as ‘Find and Call’ from being listed. The same app also made its way into the Google Play marketplace, with the result that Android as well as iOS devices became vulnerable to the Trojan.

In recent news, an IT security problem dubbed ‘Malware Monday’ was a major concern for small and medium-sized businesses everywhere as the FBI shut down DNSChanger servers. This caused a major problem for those who attempted to access the internet using a computer that was infected with the malware.

Providing a robust level of IT security involves surmounting two distinct challenges. Not only must IT support personnel deal with the current threats that exist in the known information security environment, they must also attempt to fend off other threats that are as of yet unknown. Sometimes these threats represent a new form of an old trick, a new virus, for example.

Most individuals even tangentially connected to computer usage in the workplace have heard the term malware to refer to malicious programs such as Trojan horses and viruses.  Far fewer, however, may be familiar with the phenomenon of ‘scareware’.  From an IT support standpoint, however, scareware can be every bit as hazardous to systems at small and medium-sized business as its better-known cousins.

The hacker group referred to as 'Anonymous' has recently launched a cyber attack, this time targeting a pair of trade associations in the area of technology.  The attacks took the form of a distributed denial of service, a technique that can make web sites inaccessible.  The group, which is considered a ‘hacktivist’ organization because its attacks generally relate to policy aims rather than the theft of personal information, was protesting legislation currently before Congress.  The legislation would serve to encourage businesses to share information about the threat environment with government officials.