Blue Ridge Technology

That long password isn’t keeping you better protected Conventional password wisdom says the longer the password, the better. But that’s only partly true. An unusual new finding from Specops Software is that even 15-character passwords are cracked fairly often: it’s the eighth-most common length of password to be compromised. Here’s what this new research shows, what it means for you, and the steps you can take to keep your business safe. The Findings The company evaluated over 4 billion unique compromised passwords for the study, so it’s pretty safe to trust their findings. Of those 4 billion cracked passwords, 67.7 million were 15 characters or longer. Eight-character passwords are still the most commonly compromised (the company thinks that’s because Active Directory, an older but still active Microsoft product, defaults to eight-character passwords). The Limits of the Findings Before we get too far ahead of ourselves, it’s worth noting that these findings do have some significant l...

3 steps to better cloud security These days, the cloud is everywhere. And that’s (mostly) a good thing: if you’re working from home — or have anyone on your team accessing your business systems remotely — then you’re most likely already relying on the cloud in numerous ways. Work flows better when everyone can access what they need from anywhere. Still, you might be leery of a broader move to the cloud. Sure, maybe it’s good for occasional file sharing or storage, and maybe a provider like Microsoft already convinced you to move email to the cloud (probably without all that clear an explanation what was happening). But is the cloud really secure? The short answer is yes— but that doesn’t mean you’re necessarily safe. Here are some things you should know. The Cloud Itself Is Very Secure Let’s cut the mystery out once and for all: when people talk about “the cloud,” what they really mean is “someone else’s servers.” So those applications and services that used to run on your PC or on you...

Multi-Factor, A New Way of Life. Microsoft recently announced some security statistics from 2021, and they’re more than a little eyebrow-raising. The headline statistic? Microsoft blocked more than 35.7 billion malicious emails from reaching the inboxes of its Microsoft 365 customers. Yes, that’s billion — with a b . That’s nearly 100 million emails a day, or more than 4 million per hour, or almost 68,000 every minute of every day in 2021. As bad as malicious emails are, imagine how much worse they’d be without the Herculean efforts of cloud providers like Microsoft and others. We’ll cover other news from Microsoft’s latest security announcement today, plus talk about what steps you should take to make sure your company remains protected. What Were These Malicious Emails? “Malicious emails” is a broad term that can include a wide range of attacks. But most of the 35.7 billion were plain old phishing emails. That’s both good and bad news, depending on how you look at it. It’s good news ...

Multi-factor authentication (MFA) is a security and authentication protocol that has grown significantly in popularity in the last few years. You’ve probably seen the term somewhere by now, and you may even have used it in your personal life. Now, it’s time to understand what this technology is and the basics of how it works. Because MFA has gone from “probably a good idea” to mission-critical: your business needs to switch to this more secure technology. Here’s why. Multi-Factor Authentication Defined Multi-factor authentication (MFA) s a method of establishing identity that requires more than one type, or factor, of identification. We know, this definition isn’t the most illuminating, so here’s an example or two. MFA is the technology in play when you log in to your bank or other secure site, and the website requires you to input a code that it texts or emails to you. Your login info is the first factor of identification or authentication, and the temporary code is the second. Or, wh...