Blue Ridge Technology

You’ve probably seen the stats by now: data breaches can be massively expensive. The average cost of a breach in 2021 was $4.24 million globally, and for US companies that figure shoots up to $8.64 million (in 2020). No matter the size of your business, the financial costs of a data breach are concerning enough to get serious on your digital security. But the financial costs aren’t the sum total of what you’ll deal with in a breach. In fact, they’re only a small piece of the puzzle. Data breaches cause far more damage than just the monetary sort. Consider these hidden (and not so hidden) costs that you’ll face if your company goes through a data breach this year. 1. You Will Lose Clients First, if you encounter a data breach, you will with near certainty lose some of your clients. Your clients are expecting you to keep their information secure, and some of them will take a breach as serious enough to move on to a competitor. As a result, you’ll have to deal with the monetary costs of...

Your building is only as strong as its weakest point of security. The same goes for your network and digital infrastructure. Your firewall is the most significant piece of your IT security system. But how strong is it, really? You’d never dream of leaving the doors to your corporate office wide open and unmonitored overnight. No, instead you take every reasonable precaution to prevent break-ins and theft. But far too many SMBs leave the “digital doors” open or very weakly secured. Is your company one of them? Many small companies don’t even have a real firewall, and if they do, it’s not configured well. Even many medium-sized businesses don’t implement a more robust UTM firewall. Or, again, if they have one, it’s not properly configured. UTM firewalls are more robust and more powerful, providing all sorts of additional security benefits. In recent years, costs have dropped significantly as well. Today, nearly every SMB can afford to implement this better technology. Not sure whether sw...

What is a Firewall? A network firewall is typically a hardware appliance that provides network security by filtering inbound and outbound data and internet traffic according to user-defined guidelines. Generally speaking, the firewall’s job is to decrease or remove any malicious communications or data while allowing legitimate communications to the network to flow easily. In most infrastructures, the firewall is the first layer of security in place that can prevent an attack. In this blog, we will be starting with an explanation of traffic through Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and User Datagram Protocol (UDP) packets and then we will move into the various issues related to security. Network Security TCP Network Packets We are going to take a look at the appearance of network traffic but first we will explain the protocols of the network traffic. TCP is the standard that defines the establishing of a network “handshake” or how applications and programs interchange data. UDP is an...

While most e-mail platforms offer scanning and filtering, this is often not enough security to protect yourself from spammers and hackers.. Basic e-mail filtering isn't sufficient to provide adequate spam detection, and they often allow phishing, and potential threats through to the network. Online security specialists generally believe that the number of email and phishing attacks are on the rise. Companies can improve their security awareness and decrease the risk of email threats by applying dedicated anti-spam filtering services. E-Mail Filtering: Preventing Spam What Anti-Spam E-mail Filters Actually Do E-mail filters use various security mechanisms to detect spam and dangerous e-mails. This includes blacklists of senders and websites included in spam. These mechanisms are updated in real-time to protect against newly created attacks. A powerful anti-virus engine also looks for links to malware and sites that hide the real identity of the proxy server. In order to allow the sy...