Have you heard of the damage the Stuxnet worm has been causing businesses and their computer systems around the world? Have you heard of the huge impact it has had on cyber warfare? Did you know it is a USB transmitted malware that’s not that hard to stop? Have you heard of cases where entire customer lists are copied and stolen by former employees, upset that they were fired or just because they wanted more money from a competitor? Have you heard of people just walking into a company and copying all the private data stored there on a simple USB stick or on a smart phone and just walking out with it?

While we love our mobility and portability – who doesn’t love to run their business from a mobile phone when stranded in an airport for hours, waiting for their next flight? – there are serious security threats that come with the use of portable devices, especially if we don’t know what we’re doing. Enter data loss prevention, device control and endpoint security solutions, some of the best being brilliantly developed by Mirror Communications client CoSoSys. What you also might not know is that there are virtually none such solutions to protect Mac computers! Not only does CoSoSys provide such a business application, they also have just released a new verison of their Endpoint Protector 2009 for Mac device control and endpoint security solution!

What the new product does is make sure that while you’re traveling, you can still stay productive and complete tasks which require the use of portable devices, while staying safe from the threats I’ve mentioned earlier. The new release also offers companies a closer watch on what their employees are doing with files and data accessed on or copied to portable devices. Continue reading

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A while ago, I tried to access a website I like to read, home of the odd and unusual, offbeat news, with plenty of gorgeous pictures to support the content, and flawless copywriting. To my surprise, Google had blocked the site in my browser, because it contained malware. This happened because of a flaw in MediaTemple’s security patches for sites built on WordPress, that allowed hackers to insert a malicious script. It had to be there, unobserved, for quite a while, if Google decided to block the site.

To my knowledge, many MT customers who host there blogs, have to pay enormous sums, sometimes ridiculously high, for hosting, bandwidth, etc. A popular site like Life in the Fast Lane has seen, no doubt, bank-breaking bills. The price would be well worth it, if the site owner had peace of mind. But if it happened once, who says that it will never happen again. Continue reading

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RSS might very well be one of the most overlooked technologies out there. We all use it, to read, to get content on different pages, to promote our content and our influence, but we rarely talk about it, there are a handful of articles on strategies, best practices and the likes. But there are special plugins to enhance your feed, there is RSS feed advertising, there are buttons showing RSS readers numbers. So here’s the paradox: if the technology is actually important, why do we fail to talk about it?

As it happens to some technologies, they are extremely useful, but lack a certain coolness factor, so we ignore them. We use them, we appreciate their value, but they are almost nonexistent in what we say, write or recommend. And then a comment someone makes that they have subscribed to an RSS feed reminds us that we depend on it! Continue reading

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Sometimes work is purely fun and I feel bad getting paid for it. Like being there when this fun ad was created for one of the Mirror Communications clients, CoSoSys, vendor of leading endpoint security and data loss prevention solutions.

The ad is meant to emphasize how a company can simply not worry about thieves coming in and trying to steal their sensitive data. More on data loss and theft, how to prevent it and how serious it can be here.

Hope you enjoy the ad! Oh, and I challenge you to find me in the ad

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What I think you shouldn’t have missed last week…

The last week of January 2009 comes with the 20th edition of the Monday reading tips brought to you by Words of a Broken Mirror.

We’ll start with some interesting top 10 trends for 2009 from Samll Business Trends: the top 10 software publishing trends by Tim Berry and the top 10 global trends for SMBs by Laurel Delaney.

Mihaela Lica raises the issues of spam-like ads on Twitter, an attempt thought of by Magpie, not Twitter’s monetization team as you might have thought.

Lip-sticking has published an inspirational guest post by Mary Schmidt on powerful first ladies, what they have achieved and what women in general can accomplish, regardless of being married to powerful men.

Brad Shorr of Word Sell Inc. discussed the issue of business-to-business sales and how managing daily pains helps build or demolish businesses and individual careers.

Brian Solis of PR 2.0 pointed out that social networks are growing up as more adults are joinging the conversation.

Hoping you’ve enjoyed this week’s list, I invite you, as always, to share your recommendations in the comment box. See you next week!

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