The IT Experts

How to Keep Track of Things in Your Inbox

The typical inbox has a considerable amount of messages, important ones mixed amongst the various group messages, promotional communications, and the others you may have retained. As you can imagine, this can make the important messages challenging to find… particularly as they are pushed further down into your inbox.

This can be an issue, which is why Outlook’s capability to apply conditional formatting to different messages is so useful. Doing so, you can make certain messages stand out so they’re easier to pick out from your list.

Setting the Conditional Formatting on Your Incoming Messages

For our example, let’s say that you routinely communicate with a representative from another business—maybe it’s Saul, the person assigned to your business’ account with one of your vendors. This makes it important that you see all the messages that you have exchanged with him. While setting his messages to stand out in your inbox will take a few minutes of your time, this is basically because of the many options you can select from:

• In Outlook, locate the View menu and access your View Settings.
• From there, click into Conditional Formatting. You’ll be given a list of preloaded options included with Outlook, along with buttons that say Add, Delete…, Move Up, and Move Down. Click Add.
• A new rule will be added to the list of options called Untitled. Rename it to whatever works for your purposes. For this example, we’ll call it Saul.
• Click the button that says Condition… to establish when this rule comes into play. This can be dictated by any of many different options: whether a word or phrase is included in the message, who the message came from, when it was sent, and even whether the message was sent to you specifically or to a larger group of recipients. Some of these can be disabled by unchecking the appropriate box or leaving the field blank. Let’s stick to simply specifying that these messages are ones sent directly to you, from Saul.
• You’ll be brought back to your list of rules in Conditional Formatting. With your Saul rule still selected, click the Font button.
• You can then adjust the way that the messages that meet your conditions will appear in your inbox. You can change the font, the font style, its size, add strikeout or underline effects, and even change its color. In this example, we’ll simply say that the messages should be highlighted in green.
• Click OK once you’re ready until all the dialogue boxes are resolved.

From that point on, your inbox should reflect these changes, with Saul’s messages appearing in green to make it clear which ones came from him. By following these steps for any messages you want to keep closer track of, your Outlook inbox will be far more manageable.

Why don’t you give it a try and subscribe for a notification each time that we post a new blog, formatting these messages to make them stand out? For more information and IT assistance, reach out to us at (954) 834-2800.

Cost: Downtime

It should come as no surprise at all that the expense associated with ransomware largely comes across because of the downtime that ransomware causes. If an attack is severe enough, a business could find itself without access to its essential data for days or even weeks—one 2020 survey estimated that a full recovery took businesses about five days to reach, with another survey placing the time around 21 days.

This is naturally a big concern for businesses, particularly because downtime has grown to be so much more expensive. Datto collected data that revealed the downtime incurred in ransomware attacks can cost more than $274,200, which is far more than the average ransomware demand asks for.

Cost: Reputational Damage

Let me ask you a question: would you be thrilled to give a business your personal data if their track record showed that they allowed such data to be locked up—and presumably stolen, as we’ll discuss?

Of course not, and you aren’t alone. Consumers from numerous different countries have all indicated that they would take their business elsewhere if an organization lost access to their data or if there was even one service disruption. 90 percent of these consumers took these kinds of things into account before becoming a patron, and half would avoid businesses that had experienced a cyberattack in the preceding year.

This is a huge issue for businesses, especially with many watchdog groups emerging to share the data that companies have lost in breaches for the sake of transparency.

As a result, companies hoping to avoid these ramifications will need to both avoid attacks and more effectively address them in the future.

Cost: Cost of Upgrades

If a business does get infected by ransomware and make it through it, it can serve as considerable motivation to improve its cybersecurity protections. Unfortunately, these improvements are themselves going to incur some considerable costs—particularly if they’re rushed through without the time taken to plan them out.

After all, with changes that are closer to a complete renovation than they are to a fresh coat of paint, you’ll have to invest some considerable capital into these changes—on top of that which is required to resolve the vulnerability that led to the ransomware attack in the first place.

Cost: Continued Extortion

We aren’t going to take any time here to define ransomware again. Instead, we want to pose a question to you:

What if your business was infected, and the decision is made to pay up to prevent your data from being deleted? How can you be so sure that your data will be returned, not just left encrypted, deleted, or sold on the Dark Web for even more profit to the cybercriminal?

You really have no way to be sure—and many cybercriminals have taken to stealing data in addition to encrypting it, exacerbating the business’ problems. The last thing a business trying to recover from a ransomware attack needs is a class-action lawsuit from all the people whose sensitive data was stolen.

Cost: The Ransom Itself

Of course, we can’t talk about the financial impacts of ransomware without addressing the ransom. While we never recommend that you pay this ransom, it may help for us to demonstrate why it is such a bad idea in a little more detail.

One might anticipate that, if comparing the price demanded by a cybercriminal to the cost of restoring a business’ network infrastructure from scratch, the former option would be the more cost-effective one to take. This is not the case at all… after all, you have no guarantee that your data will be returned in its original condition (or at all).

With this in mind, it is less surprising that paying the ransom is far less cost-effective than maintaining a backup ahead of time and restoring your data from that as needed.

Save Money, Time, and Stress by Protecting Your Business Beforehand

With that, we can conclude that proactively preparing for a ransomware event (or any other data loss issue, for that matter) is the only means of protecting your business’ interests. KB Technologies Managed IT is here to help you do so with our comprehensive backup and business continuity solutions. To find out more about what they involve, give us a call at (954) 834-2800.

What Has Been Discovered About Mobile Security

After having nagged Apple for years to share access to their OS, law enforcement finally figured it out in 2020, and in 2021, a position paper entitled Data Security on Mobile Devices: Current State of the Art, Open Problems, and Proposed Solutions explored three questions:

1. What security measures are currently in place to help deter unauthorized access to user data?
2. How do modern devices allow unauthorized access? 
3. How can mobile security be improved to prevent unauthorized access?

Researchers dug into both of today’s major platforms—Android and iOS alike—and discovered that neither of the two offered a superior security foundation when compared to the other.

While the researchers did “find a powerful and compelling set of security and privacy controls, backed and empowered by strong encryption” in the iOS platform, these tools simply weren’t being used with enough consistency to really deliver the security benefits they should have been. Android’s issues were derived from the fact that so many manufacturers have the capability to build devices that run Android and—since many of these devices would only communicate with Google HQ so often—updates were often slow to be implemented and some controls could be inconsistent.

Of course, the report included a few specific examples of the issues that were discovered:

Apple’s Security Issues

There is an argument to be made that an Apple user’s ability to securely store their data in iCloud is one of the best features of the platform. However, the researchers also uncovered that this data isn’t all that is taken in by Apple. Activating iCloud also sends a litany of other data to Apple… where other entities (like hackers and now law enforcement) can now access it.

With Apple’s security defenses less effective than they were once believed, this problem is made to be even bigger. Apparently, the researchers also have reason to believe that a tool like theirs has existed since 2018 that could allow attackers to guess user passcodes.

Android’s Security Issues

As for Android, its shortcomings were largely in its local data protection. Android has no solution that could be analogous to Apple’s Complete Protection encryption, leaving it more vulnerable as a result.

What Does This All Mean?

In so many words: neither is the perfect defense that either platform wants you to think it has.

You really shouldn’t ever assume that your data is safe to begin with. The onus falls to you and your organization to manage your data’s security. Fortunately, there are solutions available today to help, like mobile device management platforms and Bring Your Own Device policies that help ensure that your organization isn’t inviting in additional threats.

KB Technologies Managed IT can help you put these tools and more in place. Give our team of experts a call at (954) 834-2800 to get started.