Sklar Technology Partners - September 2018

Check out our September newsletter!

September 2018

7462 Old Hickory Drive, Mechanicsville, VA 23111 • www.sklartechnology.com • 804-730-2628

Not Being Proactive Will Kill Your Busi ness

3 Questions to Get You on the Right Path

Question 2: Who would want your data, and how would they get it? This is not just about theft. Expand your question to consider anything that might make applications or data inaccessible to your business or corrupt and unusable. If your business is going through a layoff or legal battle, your threats may look different. A merger or acquisition would also affect your threats, so look both at the value of your data and the changing business climate. You will also want to consider single points of failure or potential bottlenecks. Finally, you will want to consider your preparedness. Question 3: Would you know in time to stop a data breach or outage? Every business leader MUST know if they can stop a cyber-disaster before it’s too late. Can you detect it and stop it in time? How confident are you? Bottom line: You need to know the top threats, the impact associated with each threat, and the likelihood something bad will happen in the near future. Then, if or when the unthinkable does happen, you must be able to detect it and stop it before business-crippling malware takes down your company.

I am tired of seeing companies make the same ridiculous mistakes when it comes to protecting their data. Too often, smart entrepreneurs make dumb decisions, assuming firewalls will protect them while overlooking the sophisticated attacks involving social engineering and ransomware that target businesses just like theirs every day. By the time someone realizes their data is at risk, their company is already in the middle of a cyber nightmare. “What am I supposed to do?” people ask. “All of my time is spent running my company and focusing on surviving in my industry. Am I supposed to become a data security expert too?” No, of course not. Protecting your data doesn’t mean spending 10 years learning a new field. It just means being proactive. If you’re tired of being in over your head in terms of data security, get proactive and start by asking the following three questions. Question 1: What are your most important data assets? Start by looking at your data. You have more than you think. Some of it resides on servers, some on laptop hard drives. Many of your company secrets are likely stored in an email client or on someone’s mobile device. Hopefully your data is backed up regularly. Where are those backups right now? What applications do you rely on most? How long can you go without them? Consider the impact of losing one and prioritize accordingly.

risk, the trick is finding the right technology to offset it. My special report, “Will You Survive the Digital Revolution?” aims to help answer that question and many others that small-business owners have about their company. Do you know the 7 Major Threats that will take down your business? I dive into each of them on page 10 of the e-book. And you may want to rethink the role compliance plays in your company when you learn why a compliance- focused approach to data security will destroy your business (page 24). I wrote “Will You Survive the Digital Revolution?” as a resource to help business owners be proactive and stop making the same mistakes that have ruined countless other

businesses. Grab a copy of this special report at Ebook.

sklartechnology.com or by using your phone to scan the QR code on this page.

–Randy Sklar

Answering these three questions will help you assess your business risk, but once you know your

A REFERRAL IS THE HIGHEST FORM OF FLATTERY. WHEN A CLIENT REFERS FRIENDS AND ASSOCIATES TO US, IT REPRESENTS AN APPRECIATION OF A JOB WELL-DONE. IF YOUR FRIENDS OR ASSOCIATES COULD BENEFIT FROM OUR SERVICES, I’D BE HONORED TO HAVE YOUR REFERRAL!

Are You Helping Answer Your Security Questions? CYBERCRIMINALS

Greg McKeown’s ‘Essentialism’

Will Help You Declutter Your Workload

“If you don’t prioritize your life, someone else will,” writes Greg McKeown in “Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less.”When he set out to write the book, McKeown wanted to know what keeps skilled, driven people from achieving as much as possible. What he found was that many people suffer not from being lazy, but from allocating their time ineffectively. The impulse to “do it all” keeps folks from spending their time on the things that actually matter. The book, then, serves as a guide to cutting out the extraneous and focusing on the essential.

By now, we know everything we post online has probably been stored in a government server somewhere. The Cambridge Analytica scandal was a harsh reminder of what social media, particularly Facebook, can be used for. And yet, we’re still willing to share any random detail about ourselves online. Just spend five minutes scrolling through social media and you’ll see thousands of comments on a photo a repair shop shared of a vintage car with the caption, “What car did you learn to drive stick shift on?”; a few hundred people swapping stories after the local vet made a post wanting to know what your first pet was; and Grandma Sophie writing an entire paragraph about the friends she had on the first street she lived on in a post from some page called “The Good Old Days.” These all seem like the standard sort of social media clutter, but posts like this have something insidious in common: They are all connected to common security questions. Think back to the last time you set up an email or bank account. You were likely given a set of questions to provide answers to in case you ever needed to reset your password. A few common questions include:

“Life is not an all-you-can-eat buffet,” McKeown says. “It’s amazingly great food. Essentialism is about finding the right food. More and more is valueless. Staying true to my purpose and being selective in what I take on results in a more meaningful, richer, and sweeter quality of life.” This metaphor can be applied to your work life as well. There aren’t enough hours in the day to accomplish every task. The essentialist works to spend their time diligently by pursuing what actually matters, rather than filling their days with meaningless busywork. Early in the book, McKeown uses famed Braun designer Dieter Rams as an example of an essentialist. He notes that Rams’ design philosophy can be characterized by three simple words: less but better. This, in essence, is what essentialists believe. Doing your best work where it matters and cutting out the superfluous will allow you to better manage your time and increase your performance. As McKeown puts it, “It is about making the wisest possible investment of your time and energy in order to operate at your highest point of contribution by doing only what is essential.” Instead of having their energy spread out in a million different directions, essentialists channel it into what really matters. McKeown also advocates for defining your purpose in order to accurately assess what’s essential and what isn’t. The more a task contributes to your purpose, the more essential it is. Many business owners and leaders struggle to let go of tasks that are best left to other employees. If you’ve ever found yourself struggling to manage a massive workload while resenting the fact that much of what you do is needless, then it’s time to pick up a copy of “Essentialism.”

What was your first car?

What was the name of your first pet?

What street did you grow up on?

This isn’t to suggest the pages that make these kinds of posts have some nefarious intent. People like to talk about themselves, and from a marketing standpoint, these posts are greatly beneficial. When a post gets a lot of response, Facebook will boost its reach without the page having to pay for it, which means they can gather more followers with ease. But comments on such posts are visible to the whole world, and each post is attached to someone’s real name. Is it such a stretch to imagine how easily a cybercriminal could record such valuable details? We recommend not responding to posts that ask for details about your life, regardless of how mundane that information seems. And if your business has a Facebook page, help protect your followers’ information by not creating these kinds of posts. Try sharing a cat meme instead. The internet loves cat memes.

Please Stop Using These Terrible Passwords! Freedom, Dragon, 123456

DATE OF BIRTH It doesn’t take much research to find someone’s date of birth on the internet these days. Even if you never list it on your social media accounts, all your Facebook friends leaving happy birthday posts on your wall can give it away. SIMPLE WORDS ASSOCIATED WITH YOUR BUSINESS If you are a sporting goods store, do not use “basketball1” “footb@ll” or “t3nn1s” as your password. This goes for using the CEO’s name, the business name, or any of your core values. They might be easy for employees to remember, but they are also pretty obvious to cybercriminals. ANYTHING ON THE “WORST PASSWORDS” LIST Every December, the software company SplashData compiles a list of

the 100 most common and terrible passwords of the previous year. Since this list is available online for all to view, you don’t want to use any passwords on it. Check out these bad choices at Teamsid.com/worst-passwords-2017-full-list . Just a heads up — some of the passwords are pretty inappropriate, which just shows vulgarity will not protect you from hackers. As you may have noticed, passwords that are the easiest to remember are also the worst options. But if your password is too hard to remember, you end up resetting it every time you log in. Utilize password vault services to solve this problem. You can create strong, unique passwords for every account, but only have to remember one master password. We recommend checking out the services offered at LastPass.com to help keep your company safe from bad passwords.

A bad password is a greater threat to your business than almost any virus. Hackers today rely on social engineering to attack your business, meaning they target your people, not your firewalls. The security firm Preempt found 19 percent of professionals use “poor quality passwords,” making their accounts easy to compromise. This sounds like a small number, but it means if you have just 10 employees, two of them have accounts a hacker can easily break into. Here are some basic password management tips your company should follow. PASSWORD For heaven’s sake, do not use “password” as your password! And yes, this includes “clever” variations like “p@ssword” or “pa55w0rd.” These are so common, “password” is the first thing hackers and bots try when attempting to break into your accounts.

Randy and Jake’s Super Sandwich We feature a lot of creative recipes, but sometimes, all you want is a really good sandwich. This month, Randy and Jake present their secret recipe for the best sandwich you’ll ever eat.

Ingredients

• Simple Truth brand deli turkey • Handful of fresh spinach • Sriracha sauce

• 1/2 avocado, smashed • 1/2 fresh lime • Dash of Mediterranean Sea salt • 2 slices of Ezekiel bread (found in freezer section)

Directions 1. Smash avocado in a bowl and squeeze in the juice from half of a lime. Add salt to taste. 2. Spread avocado mixture over 1 slice of bread, and then cover the spread with dots of Sriracha to reach desired level of kick. On the other slice of bread, layer on several turkey slices and add a handful of fresh spinach. 3. Put your sandwich together and prepare to chow down.

7462 Old Hickory Drive Mechanicsville, VA 23111 www.sklartechnology.com 804-730-2628

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Inside This Issue

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Want to Protect Your Data? Just Ask 3 Questions! A Guide to Workplace ‘Essentialism’ Another Way Hackers Steal Your Personal Information The Worst Passwords for Small Businesses The Most Perfect Sandwich 3 Fitness Strategies for the Back-to- School Season

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Did Your Workout Routine Take a Summer Vacation? Jump Back in With These Strategies

Getting to the gym is half the battle, so make it easier on yourself by preparing in advance. Find a facility with a schedule that easily fits yours. If you’re planning to work out in the morning, set your clothes out the night before, and choose an energetic song for your alarm. If there’s a class after work, consider leaving an extra set of gym clothes at your office so you’ll never have an excuse not to go. 3. Make your workout an unavoidable part of your day. It’s tempting to join your coworkers for happy hour, especially when that outdoor patio is just around the block from your office. But what if it were that easy to get to the gym? Look for facilities that are on your commute, near your work, or close to home. If it’s easy to get to, you’ll be more likely to go and still have time for that drink afterward. It may take time to make your workout routine a seamless part of your life, but implementing some of these strategies will make it easier and more enjoyable. You might even find yourself looking forward to back-to-the- gym season!

With barbecues, trips to the pool, and indulging in refreshing beverages on the patio, summer is full of relaxation and fun. But those heart-pumping, muscle-building

trips to the gym may have become less frequent during the warmer months. If your workout routine went on its own summer vacation, here are three strategies to get back to it. 1. Find something you like to do. Maybe part of the reason your fitness routine took a break was because you didn’t enjoy doing it. If that’s the case, re-evaluate your options. There is no superior form of exercise, and there are plenty of options to align with your preferences. If you couldn’t get enough of hiking in national parks over the summer, join a hiking group in your community. If you prefer being on a team, look for a local adult league for your favorite sport.

2. Set yourself up for success. You would go to that 5:30 p.m. boot camp class, but it’s right in the middle of your daughter’s dance practice.

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