Telesys Voice and Data Blog

2016 saw many notorious data breaches, along with developments in malware and other threats to security. It’s always helpful to reflect on these developments so that the knowledge can be used in the future to aid in developing new strategies for taking on the latest threats. How will your business learn from the mistakes of others in 2017?

In both the home and the business, security cameras are becoming more and more commonplace as a means of preserving security. However, some malware can turn these devices, and others, into cyber security threats.

When you want your workforce to operate more productively, and engagement has been shown to have positive effects on productivity, it makes sense that you would want to actively promote activities that have been shown to improve engagement. One approach that many companies and organizations are now embracing is gamification. Let’s discuss the concept of gamification, and how it might benefit your business.

The vice president for Fort Worth-based Telesys Voice and IT Services, a network and technology management company, Titus said his company joined the local BBB in 2009 to strengthen their brand. "We wanted to align ourselves with a standard of trust in business. The BBB is an organization that has been upholding the standards of trust in business for over 100 years.

"In our business, transparency and trust are important. Customers need to have a trustworthy partner for their IT and technology needs," Titus said. "Our company values these things, and we found we could identify with the BBB brand."

What crosses your mind when you think about hacking attacks and data breaches? Do you picture a hacker in a ski mask typing furiously, or do you imagine scenes made memorable like those in television and film in works like Mr. Robot or Live Free or Die Hard? In the latter, hacking attacks are perpetrated by masterminds or those with grand ambition. Yet, this trend may portray an inaccurate representation of the typical hacker.

Social media is a great way for organizations to share information about their products and services, but while it’s great for those who want to reach a new audience, it’s also exposing you to another audience that you may not want to be familiar with: hackers. Believe it or not, there are hackers who are trying to take advantage of the personal information you share on your social media accounts.

Botnets are proving to be a difficult hurdle for security professionals, and it’s easy to understand why. Distributed Denial of Service attacks that can knock down servers or services, as well as hordes of remote-controlled zombie computers, are two of the most dangerous ways that hackers use botnets to serve their purposes. What can you do to protect your business from botnets?

Hackers are always getting their hands into sticky situations, but one of the hot topics in world politics--the 2016 United States presidential election--is one of the nastier ones in recent years. In the past few months alone, hackers have reportedly breached not only the Democratic National Committee, but have also infiltrated at least two state election databases.

Halloween is a time when people of all ages dress up as something spooky that they’re really not. For the scariest of hackers, every day is like a reverse Halloween as they try to scam victims by pretending to be someone safe and trustworthy--a persona that they’re really not. This Halloween, don’t get tricked by the haunted hack!

Sometimes when your workstation feels bogged down, a relatively cheap and simply hardware update can make a huge difference in performance. Adding more RAM (Random Access Memory, often just referred to as memory) can be a game changer for your bogged down PC.

As a business adopts certain “best practices,” it is important for business leaders to consider why they are adopted, and more importantly, are they really for the best? There are many problems that subscribing to false best practices can produce, and so it becomes important to identify, adjust, and resolve them.

The Internet is rife with potential threats. Some are situational, but most are deliberate actions made by malicious entities who are trying to obtain any semblance of value from you or your company. Some of these exploits have been around longer than you’d imagine possible. This has been made evident by huge Internet-based companies such as PayPal and Facebook testing positive for a 19-year-old vulnerability that once allowed hackers to decrypt encrypted data.

Intel recently found itself (once again) in hot water, mere months after many flaws were discovered in the firmware that enables all of their chips to do their job. This time, the issue could have potentially caused a permanent dip in the CPU’s capacity to function properly. This has come to be known as the Meltdown vulnerability.

It’s no secret that a business owner has more than enough to deal with, regardless of that business’ size.

Whether the business has 10 employees or 100, the business owner has to deal with the stress of managing the minutiae of everyday operations, along with any other issues that may pop up. As one might assume, financial concerns can contribute considerably to that stress.

Chatbots have been around for quite some time, and artificial intelligence is shaping the way that they are utilized for the modern business. Virtual assistants have risen in popularity, and they are featured on most smartphones out there. How can these “bots” help your organization?

The Internet of Things has been growing rapidly, and with this growth it has become a major part of daily life. There are connected devices you couldn’t even fathom being needed, but some have turned out to be exceeding useful. In 1977, the release of Star Wars saw people’s imaginations expand. The science end of the sci-fi went into overdrive, and soon communications and computing would change forever. Despite being a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, the Star Wars universe introduced several concepts of the Internet of Things, decades before the IoT was even conceptualized. This week, we will take a look at the modern day Internet of Things, and how Star Wars primed us for our own future.

You may have heard technology professionals use the word “cache,” pronounced cash, in their day-to-day duties, but do you really know what it means? Generally, the context of this word is that users should “clear the cache,” but unless you know what that process entails, you won’t really understand what the cache does or why it’s used in this way. This week’s tech term is cache, so let’s see what hidden treasures this word yields.

With the recent overhaul of Google’s G Suite productivity software products comes a new way to keep your business’ data secure. We’ll go over some of the major changes introduced in the updates, including the integration of artificial intelligence.

It sure does seem that the term “network” is tossed around an awful lot. Network security, network maintenance, social networking, network switch… but what is a network, really? That is precisely what we shall dive into here.

Managed services - what are they? The short answer, other people managing the IT systems that you rely on every day to be productive and accomplish your tasks. In essence, they are a freedom from dealing with the troublesome and time-consuming parts of leveraging technology. You may have heard this much about managed services before, but have never been given a deeper understanding of what they entail. That is precisely what we aim to accomplish below.