Tag Archives: Business & Finance

Posted on Author Atlantic Computer Services Categories Blog

The Advantages of VoIP for Businesses

Voice over IP, or VoIP, has become increasingly popular among business owners. However, many business owners ask if VoIP is viable in a landscape where many voice systems are either no longer supported or cost a fortune to upgrade.

Your business relies on a consistent and secure communication network. Therefore, choosing the right voice over IP solution is crucial for your business. Here are three things to look for when trying to find a voice over IP solution for your business.

Quality of Service – One of the biggest issues with traditional phone systems is the inconsistent quality of the calls. With VoIP, calls are routed through your internet, so distance no longer matters, and the quality of your calls is far superior.

Costs – VoIP may be more expensive than a standard phone system in some cases. However, in many cases, the overall costs of using VoIP will be offset because you will no longer need to pay for the line costs, physical hardware, and hourly labor associated with your current phone system.

Flexibility – VoIP can create flexible networks, changing how employees work and the business operates. In addition to offering internal telephony, VoIP systems allow you to connect multiple offices, make cheap international calls, or even integrate it with your video conferencing solution.

Voice over IP has become increasingly popular among business owners as a viable option to traditional phone systems. VoIP offers many benefits, such as superior call quality, cost savings, and flexibility. In a landscape where many voice systems are either no longer supported or cost a fortune to upgrade, VoIP is a great choice for businesses that need a reliable and flexible communication network.

If you’re wondering whether VoIP is right for your business, the answer is an emphatic yes. If you are considering upgrading your telecommunications infrastructure or are looking for a VoIP solution to improve employee productivity, give our team a call. We are glad to help.

0
Posted on Author Atlantic Computer Services Categories Blog

Updated Malware Attacks Point of Sale Devices

This year, security experts have found three updated versions of Prilex malware that target point-of-sale systems.

In 2014, Prilex was a type of malware that targeted ATMs. It switched to PoS (point of sale) devices in 2016, but it wasn’t until 2020 that the malware reached its peak. After that, it faded away in 2021.

Analysts at Kaspersky say that Prilex is back, and it looks like a more advanced and dangerous version of the malware has resurfaced this time. The latest version of this malware can create EMV (Europay, MasterCard, and Visa) cryptograms, which VISA introduced as a transaction validation system to help find and stop payment fraud.

The Kaspersky report explains that it lets threat actors use EMV cryptograms to do “GHOST transactions” with credit cards protected by CHIP and PIN technology.

The infection starts when a spear phishing email pretending to be from a technician from a PoS vendor says that the company needs to update its PoS software. Next, the fake technician goes to the target’s location and installs a malicious upgrade on the PoS terminals. The attackers could also tell the victim to install the AnyDesk remote access tool on their computer and then use it to replace the PoS firmware with a version that has been tampered with.

After the machine is infected, the operators will check to see if the target does enough financial transactions to be worth their time.

The new version of Prilex has a backdoor for communication. The backdoor can do many different things, like open files, run commands, end processes, change the registry, and record the screen. Once the information is encrypted and saved locally on the infected computer, the malware sends periodic requests to the control server.

Kaspersky concluded that the Prilex group knows a lot about how credit and debit card transactions work and how software used for payment processing works. This knowledge allows attackers to keep updating their tools until they find a way to get around the authorization policies and carry out their attacks.

0
Posted on Author Atlantic Computer Services Categories Blog

How To Optimize Your Website With SEO

So, you’ve built your company’s website. That’s great news and a major milestone, for sure.  Unfortunately, your work is just beginning.  If you want anybody to be able to find you among the billions of sites that make up the internet, you’re going to need a little bit of help.

The first and best thing you can do for your new site is to optimize it for SEO.

SEO is shorthand for “Search Engine Optimization.”

A long time ago, search engines weren’t all that smart. Back then, site owners could get away with things like “keyword stuffing,” which is to use the same key word or phrase up to a hundred times in a given web page’s content, thereby ramming the point home.

The search engines took a dim view of that, and the phenomenon was thankfully short-lived.

These days, search engines are much smarter.  They can skim through your content and gain an understanding of what each page of content is all about.

The important thing to understand however, is that every search engine uses a different algorithm, which means that the optimization strategies are different for each one.  Given the fact that Google is the dominant search engine on the web, when most people talk about Search Engine Optimization, what they’re really talking about is optimizing for Google.

If you use a content management system like WordPress, you’re in luck!

WordPress has tons of great plugins that help you optimize your site for Google.  These will literally walk you through the process while helping to ensure that you’re making good use of titles and meta tags. Those titles and tags help web crawlers understand what your site is about.

If you’re not using an SMS, then you’re going to need to validate your HTML by hand, which is a somewhat time-consuming process, but well worth the effort.

The other big thing you can do is to make sure your website’s structure is logical and easy for a human  to follow.

If your site is just a random mishmash of poorly interlinked pages, then neither humans nor web crawlers will be able to find good information on your website. You can bet that neither will spend much time looking.  Organization is key!

Finally, make sure your content is “human readable.”

All the major search engines use LSI, which is short for Latent Semantic Indexing.  That’s just a fancy way of saying that if you build a site about the latest Apple products, web crawlers will “know” that your site is about technology and the results won’t show up when someone types in a search request for something else. Your site will not come up for “Apple Recipes”, for example, since that person is probably looking for food items.

SEO optimization is a very deep rabbit hole, but quite intuitive.  The basic idea is that you want to make sure your content is highly organized, clearly labeled, and easy to navigate to.

0
Posted on Author Atlantic Computer Services Categories Blog

Known Senders Option In Google Calendar Decreases Spam Invites

Recently, Google’s engineers introduced a small but important feature to their Calendar app.  If you haven’t used the “known senders” option, you owe it to yourself to check it out.

It allows you to toggle a setting that will filter out invites from people you don’t know, with an eye toward eliminating or drastically reducing instances of invites from people you don’t know automatically appearing in your calendar.

It’s a surprisingly good addition because prior to its inclusion, you had to jump through an annoying number of hoops to filter out unknown senders. This was done in a process which forced you to disable automatic event additions entirely, meaning that you had to respond manually to every invitation.

Google had been promising this fix since 2019 but time, circumstance, and recent events including the pandemic delayed its release significantly.  Its recent release received little fanfare and with everything going on, it would be no great surprise if you missed it.

It’s worth mentioning that the new setting won’t do anything to prevent you from receiving spam invitations, but they won’t land on your calendar, which is what most people are after.

It’s a small change but much more helpful than you might think. It is one of a multitude of recent improvements to a whole range of Google’s Workspace apps in recent months.

If you rely on Google Calendar to help keep yourself organized, you’re sure to love this feature.

Kudos to Google for continuing the hard work of continuous improvement with an eye toward an ever-better user experience.  It is work that often goes unnoticed and underappreciated but over the last few years, we’ve seen Google’s entire suite of productivity apps improve markedly. We can hardly wait to see what further improvements lie ahead.

0
Posted on Author Atlantic Computer Services Categories Blog

Cyber Security Best Practices For Businesses

Smaller companies often struggle to develop and invest in robust IT security systems, which can leave them relatively more vulnerable to cyber attacks.

If that’s the situation you’re in and you’re trying to decide what to invest in and where to use the money that you have to spend on IT security, here’s a quick overview of the basics you need to have covered.

1 – Door Access Control

Believe it or not, this properly falls under the cybersecurity umbrella since magnetic door locks and swipe cards (or similar technology) are ultimately managed via a server on your company’s network.

If you don’t have such a system in place, we strongly urge you to consider one. Once it’s in place, regularly review who has what level of access.

In addition to that, most door security systems include some type of monitoring software, and it pays to set up automated alerts when an employee shows as deviating from their usual routine.

Example:  If Linda’s regular work schedule has her swiping her card and entering the office just before 8AM, and leaving a little after 5PM and suddenly you see her coming in at 3:00 in the morning, that’s a sign that something is amiss and is well worth investigating.

2 – Encryption, Encryption, Encryption

Even if a hacker breaches your network, they can’t make use of any files they get their hands on if they can’t decrypt the data.

There are three types of encryption you want to be focused on:  Encryption at rest, encryption in use, and encryption in transit.  If your files are encrypted in all three states, a hacker is going to be hard-pressed to get anything useful from your network, even if they break in.

 3 – Ongoing Security Training

The sad truth is that all the fancy hardware and software in the world can be circumvented by going after the weakest link in your security chain, which is always your people.  If someone uses a weak password for the sake of convenience, that’s a way in for a hacker.

If someone is prone to opening email attachments from unverified sources, that’s another potential inroad. The problem is that too many employees don’t fully appreciate the security risks that these seemingly innocuous activities carry with them.  Make sure they know.  Make sure everyone knows.

There’s a lot more to robust security of course, and cybersecurity is constantly evolving, but if you start here, with these three items, you’ll be miles ahead.

0
1 2 3 4 … 21