Tag Archives: compliance

Do You Know Your Data Is Safe?

Posted on by by Todd A Long

I just heard about a local business that might lose the ability to accept credit cards because cardholder data had been stolen from their Point Of Sale (POS) System.

According to an associate close to the situation; the business had granted the vendor of their POS System remote access to the System via an insecure protocol… AT THE VENDOR’S GUIDANCE!

Payment Card Industry (PCI) compliance is a difficult undertaking for a small business, but just by following PCI Data Security Standard (DSS) Requirement #1 “Install and maintain a firewall configuration to protect cardholder data“, this business could possibly have avoided a security breach and the predicament in which the business owners now find themselves.

Perhaps your business does not need to be PCI compliant, but do you know your data is safe? Do you have a Secure Network?

If you don’t know, please consider Contacting Me.

Patching… Today’s AntiVirus

Posted on by by Todd A Long

I had a client ask me today “hey, what’s with all the patches and updates lately?”. Without even thinking, I replied “it’s the Anti-Virus of the day”.

I’ve been thinking about that some. If the current Anti-Virus products can’t protect our computers (and it appears they can’t), what can? Patches and updates. The “Bad Guys” are exploiting known vulnerabilities and the only way to stop them is to remove those vulnerabilities.

Is your “Anti-Virus” up-to-date? If not, maybe you should be thinking about creating a policy that defines what exactly should be on your computers, remove what shouldn’t be and then develop a procedure for keeping everything up-to-date.