Last week one of my Small & Medium sized Enterprise (SME) customers got hacked. For them, and for me, this is really disappointing and not something anyone wants to have to deal with at any time, let alone in the current difficult situation. I spend a lot of time and effort trying to make all of my customers IT systems as safe and secure as possible but this security breach serves to underline that no IT system can ever be 100% secure.

I’m going to describe what happened so that you may have a better understanding of how these attacks can be carried out. If the knowledge of this attack helps you to improve your own IT security then all the better. Read More…

We all make mistakes and one I made reminded me of how dangerous a service called UPnP can be and why you should make sure your router is not using it.

I purchased a new Wi-Fi IP telephone so I can use a Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) service around the home as well as anywhere with a wireless (Wi-Fi) service. My business number is a VoIP service and at the moment it works with a desk based IP telephone. It would be great not to have to keep running to the phone when I’m not sitting next to it. Hence the purchase of the wireless device.

I ran into a few problems trying to get the new phone to work with my telephone service and one of the suggestions was to make sure that the Universal Plug and Play (UPnP) service was turned on at my router. I don’t have this service turned on as it is a security risk but to see if it helped I turned it on and it made no difference. Then I made my mistake. I was so focussed on getting the new phone to work that I forgot to turn the UPnP service off. Oops… Read More…

When I went back to working from home I faced a problem that many home based businesses have to solve. I have a standard BT telephone line complete with my home number and a broadband service that uses the same line. I wanted to have a completely separate telephone number for my business so I could keep business calls away from my home number.

The obvious solution would be to have a second telephone line installed just for business use. This is what many people do but it has its drawbacks. You have to pay the line rental for a line that may not get a lot of use and the call charges are not very competitive. I had used the two line solution when I first started my business and I did not want to do it again so I looked for another way.

The solution I finally chose is the one I still use now. I have a Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) telephone that uses my Internet connection to make and receive calls. It works in a similar way to services like Skype, Google Hangouts, WhatsApp and many other proprietary solutions but with some big advantages over those systems. Read More…