Click here for a reprint of a timely article written by Jason Harrel of the Central Valley Business Journal. We are reprinting it with their kind permission. Find out how your business will fare with the new Federal Recovery Plan.

This month the Central Valley Business Journal featured ITSolutions-Currie. The piece speaks for itself and provides incite into the rationale and goals that have driven our merger. We encourage our customers to read it. We’re sincerely proud of the article. Here is the website to access it and print it if you wish. . .
Central Valley Business Journal

The Weakest Link in Network Security Continued

Your small-business network may be protected by firewalls, intrusion detection and other state-of-the-art security technologies. And yet, all it takes is one person's carelessness, and suddenly it's as if you have no network security at all.

Let me give you an example. In March 2006, a major financial services firm with extensive network security disclosed that one of its portable computers was stolen. The laptop contained the Social Security numbers of nearly 200,000 people. How did it happen? An employee of the firm, dining in a restaurant with colleagues, had locked the laptop in the trunk of a SUV. During dinner, one of the employee's colleagues retrieved an item from the vehicle and forgot to re-lock it. As fate would have it, there was a rash of car thefts occurring in that particular area at that particular time, and the rest is history.

The moral of that story is clear: No matter how secure your network may be, it's only as secure as its weakest link. And people--meaning you and your employees--are often the weakest link. It's important to note that poor security puts your business, as well as your partners, at risk. As a result, many enterprises and organizations, such as credit-card companies, now specify and require minimum levels of security you must have in order to do business with them.

So what can you do?

Who’s Listening to Your Phone Calls?
reprinted with permission from the HP Small Business Center

Simple to use and cost effective, VoIP (Voice over IP) solutions have taken the communications world by storm. But with this increase in popularity come serious security issues.

The problem with VoIP calls is the very thing that makes them so popular: they travel over the Internet. Because of this simplicity, VoIP calls can be intercepted at two points: the call setup and the call data flow. Tapping into the call setup provides the intruder with information on who called a particular number, and if they listen, what was said on that call. All that's needed to hack into a call is a packet-sniffing program that can be easily downloaded from the Internet and a tiny piece of hardware that taps into a physical wire undetected.

So just who might be spying on you?

If you have listened to the radio recently, you may have heard commercials regarding the illegal installation of software. The Business Software Alliance (BSA) is a non-profit trade association supported by its vendor partners in an attempt to advance the goals of the software industry – specifically it promotes the legal and safe distribution of software as intellectual property.

As companies have downsized and laid off employees, the BSA has been running radio spots encouraging individuals to turn in their employers and ex-employers who they believe are not in compliance regarding software purchases and copyright laws.

Read more