Security Guidance for Small Businesses and some other topics.

First I will state that if you use a managed service provider for your small business, and they are good, they "should" handle this for you as part of their service unless you are paying rock bottom prices. You get what you pay for and IT folk work hard to know what to do to optimize your systems for productivity. There are three main steps to this:  Open a powershell window as administrator copy and pasting some powershell code to run in that window press enter after pasting to run the code For Windows 10: Click on the Start button or press the Windows key on your keyboard. Type "PowerShell" into the search bar. Right-click on the "Windows PowerShell" result and select "Run as administrator". If the User Account Control dialog box appears, click "Yes" to allow the app to make changes to your device. For Windows 11: Right-click on the Start button or press the Windows key + X on your keyboard. From the menu that appears, select "Wi...

If you want to protect your business you need to be prepared. A Risk Assessment is key to understanding what you potential problem areas are.  The first step to do is gather an inventory which I covered here: https://securityguypro.blogspot.com/2023/07/inventory-your-business.html I could write even more about the processes but there are already some excellent resources available at the links below. https://www.ready.gov/risk-assessment https://www.epa.gov/risk https://www.hhs.gov/hipaa/for-professionals/security/guidance/guidance-risk-analysis/index.html https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNUBMLVr9z4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=61roNgguC1k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-E-jfcoR2W0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fXbC_IFrhuE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5kDmCHZCPVw

 The start of getting a good grasp on your company's cybersecurity posture is to gather an inventory of your business. An example of why this is necessary is: I recently had a conversation with a business that had scanned copies of all the checks from transactions they did with customers. They had years worth of scans of these documents. If they were to have the data stolen, being they are in Texas, they would likely been liable for complying with the  Texas Identity Theft Enforcement and Protection Act (TITEPA) For TITEPA, if you fail to take reasonable action to comply with the breach notification requirements of the law, the Texas Attorney General may seek civil penalties from $2,000 to $50,000 per violation. In cases of unlawful data disposal, your business can be fined up to $500 for each record. If you think it will never happen to your company, check out this list from the TX AG office and click on the right hand most column to sort by date: https://oag.my.site.com/data...

Dealing with the constant barrage of SPAM emails that flood your inbox is frustrating. These unsolicited messages clutter your inbox and ruin your productivity. Here are a few things to do to reduce spam if you use Microsoft 365. Step 1 : Enter your domain name on mxtoolbox and get a report: https://mxtoolbox.com/emailhealth/ Step 2 : Look for these three low hanging fruit items: SPF, DKIM and DMARC Step 3 : You can either fix these yourself by following any of the instruction sets below or you can find a freelancer on upwork.com to assist. The link for upwork searches for M365 setup to get you to the right professionals. Here are three different sets of instructions on configuring you M365 for securing your e-mail: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/security/office-365-security/email-authentication-about?view=o365-worldwide https://www.dmarcly.com/blog/how-to-set-up-dmarc-dkim-and-spf-in-office-365-o365-the-complete-implementation-guide https://lazyadmin.nl/office-365/of...

If you've been using your Windows computer for more than a year, you may have noticed that the free disk space gradually dwindles, or perhaps you're encountering issues installing updates. Don't panic, there's a way to address this by using couple of commands. There are two tools that will likely clean things up for you. The first is DISM, short for Deployment Image Servicing and Management. I suggest you run this tool once to clean up and a second time to perform a health check on windows. Before continuing, save all work and close all applications. With everything closed out the next step is to launch an Administrator command prompt to run these commands. Click on the Start Menu and type "cmd" into the search bar. In the search results, you'll see "Command Prompt." Right-click on it and select "Run as administrator." Next you will need to copy and paste or type in the commands. You will run them one after the other. Be patient as they...