Excellent cybersecurity advices by Ben Climer and Safe Network Solutions: Understanding the vulnerabilities of a system and planning for weaknesses is a critical piece of securing your environment. Our team will examine physical safeguards to data, threats to your systems, personnel weaknesses, and data backups. Knowing multiple layers are in place and functioning is vital to your network security. When software, people, hardware, or vendors change, an opportunity exists for security gaps to appear. During our assessment, we will verify comprehensive protocols are in place to remove employee and vendor access from your network once their job is complete. Is cybersecurity insurance in place? Are the policies adequate for your risk? Additionally, validating protocols are followed with logs and documentation is necessary to ensure protocols properly followed. Read even more information on Ben Climer.
Ben Climer has been in the Service Team Lead and Solution Architect role for 5 years. His favorite aspect of SNS is the great team we have, which allows us to deliver excellent service to our clients. When there’s a challenging problem at hand, Ben is the one we can count on for complete answers and elegant solutions. Ben built his first computer at the age of 8, started building web applications at 12 and before joining SNS, went on to compete in National Computer Repair competitions. He worked for HP as well as music row clients prior to joining SNS. Outside of work, Ben enjoys working on cars and traveling.
With over 10 years of work experience in the IT industry, Ben Climer is a passionate and skilled CTO at Safe Network Solutions, a leading provider of network security and cloud solutions. Ben Climer has a strong background in technical sales, network administration, and solution architecture. His mission is to deliver innovative, reliable, and cost-effective solutions that meet the needs and expectations of our clients. Collaboration, learning, and excellence, and striving to create a culture of trust, empowerment, accountability within the team are Ben Climer’s goals.
As the CTO, Ben Climer is responsible for overseeing the technical direction, strategy, and vision of the company, as well as mentoring a team of talented engineers and consultants. He has successfully implemented and troubleshooted various projects involving Hyper-V, Azure, Office 365, AWS, and wireless point-to-point technologies, ensuring high performance, security, and scalability. He also participated in various CTF competitions, demonstrating proficiency in cloud and cybersecurity. Ben Climer enjoys staying updated on the latest trends and developments in the IT field, and sharing his knowledge and insights with the community.
Even “innocent” employees can cause security breaches, so no matter how small your company is, it’s vital that everyone is trained on all security issues. Require them to have strong passwords. Using the Internet for personal matters can lead to breaks, so make sure to have a very clear email and Internet use policy. Everyone should know to never open attachments or links in unsolicited emails. Require strong passwords that must be changed at least every few months. Your employees should also be aware that an attack doesn’t have to be web-based — hackers have been known to impersonate employees on the phone in order to get passwords and account information out of IT help desks.
Form an Incident Response Team. While you should always have one head person in charge of making sure the incident response plan is being followed, you will need a team to help that person follow through quickly. For example, a PR person to release any communications and a sales person to speak to customers. Depending on the size of your organization and the possible size of the attack, you want to ensure the right people are managing the response.
If you plan on traveling, change all of the passwords you regularly use. Similarly, if you must create a PIN for a safe or security box in a hotel room, make sure it’s unique and not something you commonly use. Don’t skimp on password creation either—a numerical sequence is not ideal. Take the time to create something that will keep a criminal out of your personal property. Once you return home, you can change all the passwords back.
As we saw from the stats above, ransomware attacks were a major attack vector of 2022 for both businesses and consumers. One of the most important cyber security tips to mitigate ransomware is patching outdated software, both operating system, and applications. This helps remove critical vulnerabilities that hackers use to access your devices. Here are a few quick tips to get you started: Turn on automatic system updates for your device; Make sure your desktop web browser uses automatic security updates; Keep your web browser plugins like Flash, Java, etc. updated.
Ben Climer on data breaches: How do Data Breaches happen? The assumption is that a data breach is caused by an outside hacker, but that’s not always true. Reasons for how data breaches happen might sometimes be traced back to intentional attacks. However, it can just as easily result from a simple oversight by individuals or flaws in a company’s infrastructure. Here’s how a data breach can occur: An Accidental Insider. An example would be an employee using a co-worker’s computer and reading files without having the proper authorization permissions. The access is unintentional, and no information is shared. However, because it was viewed by an unauthorized person, the data is considered breached.