BlackBerry Management Center: Reining in Smartphone Chaos

If smartphones are a small-business boon, they’re also a potential liability.

Not only do businesses who offer them to employees have to keep track of who is using what device, they’re also loaded with information you don’t want “just anyone” to have access to. (If you’ve ever had to replace a lost or stolen company smartphone, you know what a hassle it can be.)

The Waterloo, Ont.-based smartphone giant Research in Motion recently debuted its new BlackBerry Management Center — basically a do-it-yourself tool for managing three to 100 BlackBerry devices. It’s free, which makes it an appealing choice for companies that can’t afford expensive IT services to handle their growing arsenal of smartphones.

It’s also one more reason RIM hopes businesses will continue to use its products. Google’s recent blockbuster buy-out of Motorola Mobility means these business oriented technologies are more important to the struggling smartphone maker than ever before.

Here’s a first look:

What it is: BlackBerry Management Center lets you manage your business’s BlackBerry devices from anywhere using an online Web application. You can manage a number of things through the service like setting up email, contacts and calendars for each of your company phones. If a phone gets lost, you can lock it and display a message telling whoever finds the phone how it can be returned. Worst case scenario: you can use BlackBerry Management Center to wipe the data from a lost or stolen phone, including its microSD card. You can also restore the settings and content from a lost or broken phone onto a new phone.

What you might like: Managing user phones from the Web application is as easy as promised, although you’re going to have to do some legwork to sync company devices with your BlackBerry Management Center account. The hard part mostly boils down to retrieving several ID numbers attached to your various BlackBerry devices as well as making sure apps like BlackBerry Protect and email are properly configured on each device. Once that’s done, using the service is pretty much a matter of navigating a few simple menus that display your options for each smartphone.

Another useful feature: Employees who use their personal Blackberry devices in your business can add them to the service. In that case, users can determine how much control BlackBerry Management Center has over their device.

What you might not like: The mobile work crowd is diverse. And if they’re not all using BlackBerrys, they’re not all controlled by this product. Which absolutely limits how much order the Management Center will bring to the mobile chaos in your shop.

What to do: If your shop has a bring-your-own-gadget-to-work culture, Management Center is not for you. It simply does not support a broad enough array of devices to make it worth the hassle. But if your business has even a couple of BlackBerry devices in the mix, this service could provide some peace of mind.

By, Sonumati

• April 21, 2021
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Is Technology Killing Your Productivity?

Office technology can enhance productivity by automating time-consuming drudgery and offloading brain-draining tasks such as managing budgets and organizing records. But the same technology can also prove to be time-wasters, especially if used incorrectly.

Business owners often come to rely too much on a specific tool or app because of its novelty or because it’s what they’ve been using for years without giving much thought to whether it’s making their companies and employees more productive.

Take Bryan Council, co-founder and president of Birmingham, Ala.-based broadcast news-monitoring firm Metro Monitor, for example. Two years ago, he reevaluated the 18-year-old company’s technology processes. One of the biggest changes he made was switching from using Microsoft Office software such as Word and Excel to the online Google Docs applications. Service upgrades are made automatically and the web-based automatic version tracking functions eliminate the need for employees to pass documents around or rename files after making changes.

“Conservatively, I would estimate we see about three hours a week in time savings [after switching to Google Docs],” Council says.

We asked small-business owners about which applications they’ve found to be the biggest time-wasters. Here, they’ve identified the top seven and offer solutions for how to improve efficiency.

1. Contact management apps
Businesses often don’t have client contact information stored in one centralized application. Instead, employees carry separate contact lists spread over numerous apps like Apple Address Book and popular email services including Microsoft Outlook and Google’s Gmail. It wastes time having to ask around about who has the relevant contact information or, worse, not being able to find it at all.

Solution: For the same reason he likes Google Docs, Council suggests moving contacts online with Salesforce, a database that can be accessible by any employee, anywhere, with fields for recording details about client interactions. Pricing ranges from $5 to $25 per user per month, depending on the features.

2. Social media apps.
Even when used for business promotion, people can waste time using social-media apps such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn if they jump at every message or troll constantly for mentions of their company or other topics.

Solution: First, don’t use a web browser for monitoring social media apps. Active social networkers should use a free dashboard app such as TweetDeck or Hootsuite, says Glenn Phillips, president of San Francisco-based computer consulting firm Forté. Dashboards aggregate multiple services for a quick overview and allow users to schedule several social posts at a time.

Also consider checking messages at regular, predetermined intervals. For Twitter, Council suggests creating saved searches that collect mentions for later reading. He also recommends setting up a separate email account that’s dedicated specifically for social media so your updates don’t distract you from important work email.

3. Email
If not prioritized appropriately, checking and responding to email can be a time-killer, warns Jared Goralnick, founder of Walnut, Calif.-based AWAYfind, a maker of email alert software. People often respond to emails in the order that messages arrive rather than in order of importance, he says.

By, Sonumati

• April 21, 2021
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What to Do If Your Business Gets Hacked

Your business has been hacked. It’s bad news, but it doesn’t have to cripple your operation.

Cyber-crooks increasingly are targeting small businesses to steal information such as passwords that lead to bank account balances and credit lines, customer data and sensitive product details. Hackers also may try to virtually hijack company computers or websites and use them to attack others online. They know most small businesses lack the security expertise, data protections and response tools that large companies have at their disposal.

Falling victim to a hack can be costly. Malicious or criminal data breaches on average cost victim companies $318 per compromised record in 2010, according to Traverse City, Mich.- based research firm Ponemon Institute.

But having a security recovery plan can make the process smoother and less expensive. Here are six critical steps to take if your business has been hacked:

1. Find out what happened.
To respond effectively, get a full picture of what happened, including how the hackers got in, which computers and accounts were compromised, which data was accessed or stolen and whether any other parties — such as customers or business partners — were affected.

This can be a difficult process involving costly security consultants, but you may be able to get less expensive help from companies you do business with, including your Internet service provider, security software company or website hosting firm. But the best route may be to contact your local, county or state police computer crimes unit and the FBI, which can do forensic analyses and provide valuable guidance.

2. Seek legal advice.
If you don’t have a special cyber-insurance policy that will provide an experienced attorney, you may need to hire one to navigate the legal issues. For instance, when hackers gain access to the personal information of customers or employees, you likely have a legal obligation to notify them, says Todd B. Ruback, a Warren, N.J.-based privacy attorney who specializes in data breach response.

You may also be required to alert state authorities. Because there isn’t a federal data-breach notification rule, companies that do business nationally may have to comply with as many as 46 different state laws. You also could face liability lawsuits from affected parties.

3. Communicate early and often.
Quick and honest communication with affected employees, customers and partners — about what happened, what you’re doing about the problem and what they need to do — is often more than just a legal requirement. It may be necessary to salvage your business.

“A data breach can be fatal for a small business” if monetary losses, the cost of rebuilding or reputation damage is high, says Michael Kaiser, executive director of the National Cyber Security Alliance, a public-private partnership based in Washington, D.C. “Maintaining trust in a crisis is the best way to hold onto your customers.”

4. Eliminate the problem.
To limit the damage, you may need to take disruptive and costly steps, such as removing infected computers and shutting down your website while you clean up. Consider reformatting hacked computers and restoring data with clean backups, or simply buy new computers.

If hackers exploited a software flaw, apply a “patch” from the software maker that fixes the problem or implement a recommended workaround. If they stole passwords, secure your accounts and set new, complex passwords that will be hard to crack.

5. Rebuild.
Put in place the technology and policies to help fend off future attacks. Make sure your computer operating system and other software are current and, if possible, receiving automatic updates to fix bugs. Consider designating one computer for online banking only, meaning no Web surfing and no email that might expose you to malware designed for financial fraud.

6. Revisit your security plan.
Make sure your security defenses are running properly and that data is being backed up securely. Your IT manager should consider setting up activity “logging,” or tracking, on all devices on your network so any future problems can be investigated more easily, says Brian Honan, principal consultant at Dublin, Ireland-based security firm BH Consulting.

Check with customers, partners and vendors to see what they’re doing to protect your data. Consider buying a cyber-insurance policy if you don’t already have one. Also, create a disaster recovery plan and train employees so everyone can respond quickly and calmly if faced with a hack or other crisis again.

By, Sonumati

• April 21, 2021
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How to Avoid One of the Biggest Email Hacking Threats

You might have heard of something called “spear phishing.” It’s an attempt to hack your computer or your accounts, or to con you out of money, by using an email message that’s tailored to you or your company. A phisher piques your interest with a conference invite, resume or invoice. But it’s a ruse to get you to provide sensitive information such as passwords, click on an infectious attachment or website link, or participate in a shady deal.

These personalized, deceitful messages can be crafty and believable enough to slip by spam filters and other security protections and to trick you — the last line of defense.

About one in every 300 emails in 2011 was a phish, according to security software maker RSA, a unit of EMC Corp. Entrepreneurs should be concerned because these emails are increasingly surfacing at the office. In a separate 2011 RSA Workplace Security survey, 45 percent of respondents said they had received a phish in their work email. Often, they are personalized “spear” messages to specific employees, sometimes including details mined from LinkedIn and other social networks to make them more plausible.

Spear phishing emails can be alarmingly effective. RSA, Google and a slew of large companies had valuable intellectual property stolen over the last two years in attacks that began with a spear phish of an employee. “They’re aiming for fewer targets, but they’re aiming for a higher yield,” says Jason Hong, an associate computer science professor at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Mellon University and founder of Wombat Security Technologies, maker of a phishing filter and educational tools for companies.

Small companies have been targets of spear phish attacks, too. Last spring, an employee in receivables at a Wichita, Kan., ServiceMaster franchise opened an email tailored to her and unleashed a virus that scrambled her computer and sent spam to her contacts. The franchise’s mail server was also upended and shut down for most of the following two days while a technology consultant cleaned up, the company says.

Some spear phish attacks can cause more financial damage. Take PrintedArt, a Franklin Lakes, N.J., company that sells artwork. It has received several emails in recent months from supposed customers requesting unusual shipping arrangements requiring the firm to wire thousands of dollars to international shipping agents. But Klaus Sonnenleiter, the company’s president, became suspicious that the agents were impostors and refused the orders.

Here’s how you, too, can avoid getting reeled in by a phisher.

Use technology as the first line of defense.
Security technologies can block many phishing attempts before they reach anyone. Do the basics: use up-to-date antivirus software and spam filtering, and keep the software on your computers current with the latest updates — especially Adobe products and Java, whose bugs have been heavily exploited by malware writers.

Specialized anti-phishing technologies can also help. Major web browsers use built-in blacklists that provide a safeguard against known phishing websites. Google’s blacklist is used in the Firefox, Safari and Chrome browsers, while Microsoft’s blacklist is used in Internet Explorer.

And there are filters that use “heuristics,” a set of rules used to detect phishing that can block some attacks but can also generate false alarms. Microsoft includes this technology in SmartScreen, a feature in Exchange, Hotmail and Internet Explorer, and many security-software makers include heuristics in their product suites.

Teach employees how to spot these phishing emails.
Unfortunately, spear phish are especially adept at beating security technologies because they often look like legitimate messages. When they contain malware, it’s often tweaked to get past major antivirus products. And when emails direct victims to dangerous websites, the sites are often new and unknown to blacklists.

You must prepare employees to identify these types of emails. Experts say educating workers and instilling a healthy level of suspicion are effective in foiling phishers, who often use emotional triggers to create a sense of fear or urgency.

About 50 percent of people will fall for a reasonably good phish, say both Wombat and PhishMe, which provide anti-phishing training services. But they say employee education can whittle that number down to 10 percent or less.

Training programs usually start with sending employees fake phishing messages. If they fall for the ruse, they are given immediate online training about how to recognize scams and protect themselves by, for example, scrutinizing email addresses and website URLs.

If in doubt about the safety of an attachment, you can tell employees to forward the message to a Gmail account and view it safely in Google Docs, rather than download it to their computer, suggests PhishMe co-founder Aaron Higbee.

You also can encourage employees to use instant messaging and work together on documents using collaboration software, he says, making your company less reliant on unsecure email.

By, Sonumati

• April 21, 2021
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