What company today operates without a website? Practically every firm in every business segment has a web-facing front end to act as a customer store front and product or service information channel. If your company’s website ‘goes down’ for any reason, the loss of face and reputation can be long lasting for customers who can quickly become disenchanted by lack of service. With this ‘reliance’ on website uptime in mind, some valuable lessons have been highlighted this month by the hack that occurred on the very popular open source web content management tool WordPress. The service was attacked and as hundreds of thousands of small to medium sized businesses (SMBs) use WordPress as the engine behind their web presence, the botnet behind this attack will have caused concern among many firms who have suffered from their websites being unavailable on both the front (user-facing) and back (company-facing) end. A total of some 64 million websites are built using WordPress and an estimated 371 million people read content posted on this service in any one month. The BBC News service this month reported that the botnet targets WordPress users with the username “admin”, trying thousands of possible passwords. Surprising though it may sound, many users still exist with the “admin” username left unchanged from the point of initial sign in, thus leaving themselves more susceptible to malware based attacks of this kind. Other users with more personalised usernames are also thought to have been affected. The attack itself began a week after WordPress confirmed that it had improved its own security systems by introducing an (albeit it optional) two-step authentication log-in option. According to instructions from WordPress itself, “When you log in to your WordPress.com account, we’ll prompt you to enter a secret number. To get that secret number, you’ll need to download the Google Authenticator App on your smartphone. It generates a new number every 30 seconds, making it virtually impossible to guess.” Again turning to the BBC report, it appears that this attack was perpetrated by hackers using what was described as a “relatively weak” botnet constructed by a group connection of home PCs. This network was then engineered to build a much larger botnet of far more powerful connected servers that could spread the attack further. Once again we come back to the very real threat this kind of malware presents to the small to medium sized business who commonly use these kinds of free and open source tools to build up and maintain their online presence. While hackers continue to derive value and pleasure out of disrupting the lives of ordinary citizens and companies, the best option is to adopt strong password policies, two-factor authentication options (where they exist) and robust anti-virus and malware security software throughout the business, such as AVG Business Edition 2013 .
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WordPress hackers highlight SMB risk of website loss
This month CNET’ s editorial team awarded AVG AntiVirus Business Edition 2013 4.5 stars out of a possible 5 in their latest tests. CNET, which also owns downloads.com, is one of the world’s biggest web portals. Every day thousands of people search CNET’s sites looking for reviews, news, downloads and price comparisons on various tech products. Readers trust CNET to provide objective and comprehensive advice to help them decide what technology and IT solutions they need. CNET’s in-depth product reviews always provide a reliable guide to a product’s quality and capabilities. Over the years they have been a regular advocate of AVG’s security software and we enjoy a very good relationship with them. In particular CNET praised Business Edition for bringing “ its stellar track record from its single user line” and highlighted how “AVG’s experience combined with a simplified remote management workflow makes this an attractive solution” and worth taking for a trial run. I would like to thank our hard-working development team in helping us get this recognition . 
As all entrepreneurs know, starting a business can be costly. The credit crunch has meant that finding capital to start a business is harder than ever. Saving money if and where possible can leave you with spare funds to pay for the things that simply can’t be scrimped on. The internet and the rise of apps has means it has never been easier to find the software and services you need, for cheap or free. Whether you’re looking to secure your business, create email campaigns or look after your accounts – there’s a free tool to help you do so. Here are my top five free tools: 1. Google Docs When it comes to office suites Microsoft Office has had a monopoly on the market for many years. But there are alternatives and Google Docs is one such tool which can look after all of your enterprise needs. You can create everything from word documents and spread sheets to presentations and drawings. You can then share these with your team, collaborate with a chat box on the side of the document and see changes made in real-time. If needs be you can download to documents to your desktop as Word Docs, Open Office, PDF or HTML. All for free. 2. AVG Anti-Virus Free Cyber-crime is a threat to all businesses and making sure that your computers are protected from malware is essential. AVG Anti-Virus has a free download for 2013 which is one of the most fully-featured free packages out there. It can be used to track and remove viruses from your PCs. It also contains the ‘AVG Do Not Track’ feature which gives you control over which websites can use your data. Of course this is just the very base level of protection. For greater peace of mind it’s worth looking at paying for business-strength protection (which comes with phone support) or paying your trusted local computer contractor a nominal amount each month to look after it all for you via the cloud. Given that you and your team are going to be working around the clock and on the go, make sure everyone also has the free AVG for Mobile app on their smartphones which will protect any sensitive data on there and give you the power to wipe the devices should they get lost or stolen. 3. MailChimp email campaigns Most businesses send out email campaigns to their subscribers, it’s a great way to get extra traffic to your site if needs be and create awareness of your brand among your customer base. MailChimp has a great free plan which should be big enough to cover your needs when starting off. You can send up to 12,000 emails a month to a list of up to 2,000 subscribers. The package gives you designer templates, lets you integrate the emails with your social networks, look at reports for your email’s performance and even conduct A/B testing to help you create the most effective campaigns. 4. Natural HR management software You may only have a small team to start off with but keeping on top of HR functions is an important part of retaining talent and putting together the best possible team. Natural HR offers free web-based HR software to help you keep track of employee information securely and in the cloud so no need for back-ups. 5. Free Plus Accounts Whatever the size of your business you need to have an accounting system in place. You might not have a CFO yet so having the right software can save you from making a mess of the books. Free Plus Accounts allows you to keep track of quotes, invoices, customer and suppliers lists and well as an audit trail and access to your accounts from anywhere. 
‘Bring your own device’ or BYOD was one of the biggest buzz phrases of last year. It reached far beyond the IT departments wrestling with the trend and became a talking point for every part of the debate centring on flexible working conditions. If you are to create a truly mobile workforce, giving employees access to their company documents and emails on personal devices is an unavoidable consequence. The freedom to work using home-sourced technology removes barriers and, according to many reports, increases productivity. But allowing access to company data on personal devices comes with a security risk. While some companies choose to clamp down on the trend, this isn’t always the best tactic. With adequate risk management, BYOD can work for you and your employees. Here are five top tips on implementing BYOD 1. Create a tailored BYOD policy When you are creating a plan, you need to look at your company’s own needs and specifications. How much sensitive information do your employees regularly come in contact with? What are the biggest areas of data risk? It may be the case that certain departments have restricted access on their personal devices. Any criteria should be clearly outlined leaving no room for argument should someone not understand why they don’t have access to certain things. 2. Communicate the plan with all departments There is no doubt that having an IT department that fully understands and is capable of implementing your BYOD plan is essential but there are implication for all employees and departments – HR, Legal and Finance departments are equally as important in making your strategy 3. Make sure you have the highest security software on all of the devices Before staff are allowed to start using their own devices for work purposes, your IT should make sure they are all full of the necessary security applications. Firewalls, encryption and system authentication should all be taken into account. Anti-malware protection is a must for mobile devices, as is the ability to remote wipe them should they be lost. AVG’s antivirus app for smartphones is free and not only allows you to wipe any device remotely but can also be used to locate the missing device using GPS. 4. Establish a plan for support How much can your employees rely on the IT team to help with the management of their devices? You need to establish what is possible and what is cost effective. It might not make sense to have your IT department service all of the devices but do you want to take a chance when it comes to your businesses data? It might be a good idea to limit the devices which are part of your approved BYOD plan. 5. Put in the structures needed to remove access when needed If someone is leaving the company or has breached the terms of your policy and therefore had their access right removed, you need to be able to block specific users. Being able to manage the devices from the corporate side as well as from the employee side is important. 
The reality is that mobile apps for business are still in their infancy. Within the next few years we’ll be seeing mobile applications for our phones and tablets that will truly integrate with our back end applications so that our people in trucks and in our warehouses can do data entry and look up real time information instantly. But that’s in the not so distant future. For now, there are great mobile applications available for any busy professional looking to become more productive with their smartphone or tablet, whether it runs on Microsoft, Google or Apple technology. I’d like to share 10 mobile apps we use in my company every day. These are not in any particular order. Maybe you’ve got a few to add? 1 – Evernote . I do a lot of writing. And thinking. And when I come up with a brilliant idea I pull up Evernote on my smartphone. Whatever notes I take are automatically saved on the cloud so I can access these brilliant thoughts from any other device, wherever I am. Evernote power users upload photos, images, graphics, websites and other stuff. And they love the powerful searching too. Notes can also be shared. 2 – E-mail and text. Duh. 3 – HopStop. Ever try to figure out the New York subway as an out-of-towner? It’s easier to get your PhD at Columbia. That’s why I use Hopstop every time I go to New York or any other city in the country where I want to use public transportation. You put in your starting and ending point and the application guides you through the rest, be it subway, bus, train or rickshaw. 4 – GoHowAirport. For frequent travels, learning how to best utilize time between flights is critical for staying productive. GoHowAirport has detailed information for just about every major airport in the U.S., like where to eat, where to find Wi-Fi and where to shop. That way you can have a plan of attack for when you land and not waste a moment of time while on the ground. 5 – Customer Relationship Management. If you’re using a CRM application in your business (and you better be) like Salesforce.com , ZohoCRM, Microsoft Dynamics CRM , Sugar or others, you’ll need to make sure you’re using their mobile application. It’s the only way to keep up on your calendar, callbacks, next actions and notes about that customer you’re about to meet in the next hour. You can update your daily activities too and the system will have that information real time for others to use. 6 – Square . We’ve learned to take payments on the go from clients, particularly those lovable ones that always seem to take just a wee bit longer than necessary to pay. With Square, we ask for a credit card, swipe, enter and we’re done. Yes, we pay a 2% fee, but that’s nominal compared to the time we’ve wasted before tracking down payment on our open invoices. 7 – Freshbooks . And speaking of payment, I’ve found that the biggest hurdle to getting paid on time is getting an invoice out the door on time. With Freshbooks you can create invoices right from your mobile device and email it out so that your customer has it in his hands at the same time your service guy is walking out the door. No excuses for not getting it processed as immediately, right? 8 – WhatsApp. Travel internationally? Hate paying those zillion dollar fees for texting? I rely on WhatsApp for whenever I go to the UK or Europe. It sends text messages for free over your web connection to others that have also signed up for the service. It’s not only a great way to keep up to date with clients but also to stay in touch with your family without fretting over the cost of each text message. 9 – Kindle. If you own a Kindle remember you can also download the mobile app right to your phone or tablet. This way whenever I have downtime I can catch up on the latest book I’m reading or any of the services I subscribe to right from device. 10 – An advanced calculator. Most devices come with a simple calculator but if you’re in the financial services business or need to make more complex calculations incorporating present value or logarithms then you must download SolveMyMath’s scientific calculator. You’ll have power at your fingertips and won’t need to carry around an extra device either. 
Most small to medium sized businesses (SMBs) today will have something in place that addresses the problem of unsolicited emails or “spam” as we have come to understand the term. Distributed by what we refer to as spambots (email-centric software programs) spam can reduce unprotected or unfiltered computing power to a crawl under a deluge of unwanted messages. At its most innocuous level, spam is simply annoying; but at its most harmful spam can be used to smuggle damaging malware into your systems through doctored documents, links or attachments of any shape or form. It is this danger factor that we need to remember when we now look to the increasing prevalence of so-called Internet BACN (or bacn). What is bacn? The term bacn itself has been coined due to this content’s proximity to both spam and that data which we might actually consider to be real meat i.e. information that we genuinely want to get hold of. In a recent article the BBC describes Bacn as the comparatively innocent looking newsletter style messages, user group updates, notifications, limited special offers and all manner of “special alerts” that traverse the pathways of the Internet on a daily basis. Most of us can spot bacn with not much more than a quick glance at our inbox; but falling between two stools of real junk and real messages makes bacn harder to trim off. Although many online webmail services (including Gmail and Hotmail) now provide filters and “rules” to remove newsletter-style bacn out of a user’s line of sight automatically, its wider presence is still felt by millions of users everyday. The problem is that all of us have the occasional taste for bacn and do in fact positively sign up to receive it in the first place. Many small to medium sized business employees will sign up to receive regular updates from product sales groups, business community opportunity signboards and other socially- or commercially-driven information sharing vehicles. So this is content that we ourselves have already welcomed and confirmed an interest in. The danger factor here comes from the potential for this channel to be compromised with malware, especially when many of these updates will typically come from (or appear to come from) partners, suppliers, industry bodies and known entities. It is not hard to disguise spam as bacn Both items fall into the same basic food group as it were, so it is not hard to disguise spam as bacn – and this is the pain point that SMBs need to do something about. Firms should first control and limit the amount of bacn flowing into their employees’ inboxes across desktop, mobile and cloud-based computing environments. By tuning email filters and applying malware protection technologies here, companies can keep their data assets protected appropriately. By taking back control of bacn firms also have the opportunity to quantify and qualify the amount of bacn-type content being consumed by employees. There are direct productivity implications if staff members treat themselves to too much bacn every day when they should be performing more work tasks. Everybody knows that bacon can be very tasty but too much is bad for you, the same applies to bacn. Check whether you have the right email filtering and antivirus protection technologies and if not make some changes so that everyone knows they need to trim the fat. 
Whenever I speak with clients and other business people about social media I always get an underwhelming response. Everyone sees the power and is excited by the prospect of reaching vast audiences. But most professionals fail to achieve their social media dreams. Some do, of course. Comedians, speakers, service companies and other consumer-related businesses have built a profitable engine around social media sites. People in the media use social media all the time to do research and communicate with others. So why do I encounter so many business people that have yet to use social media effectively? I think it’s because they failed to ask themselves three key questions before ever getting started. Where are my customers? Who will do the work? What are my expectations? Let’s start with customers. If you’re running a neighborhood flower shop it makes sense to have a Facebook page for your store. This is a hobby to most people. It’s fun. And you can draw in your community there. But if you’re running a company that makes silicon coated paper for user in the packaging industry I’m not so sure having a Facebook page will bring you much better. Or a Twitter presence. Or a site on Pinterest. Your customers are not there. And if they are on any of these sites it’s probably to play games or reconnect with old friends rather than to talk about silicon coated paper. If your customers are not on social media then you shouldn’t be either. Go where your customer are. It’s OK not to have a Facebook page if no one’s going to visit it. If you do decide to have a social media presence get ready to devote a lot of resources to it. Who’s going to do the work? Larger companies now fully devoted social media teams. I have a person who helps me keep up with my tweets and updates during the week. I can’t do it all. A social media site needs to be active, informative, educational and a place where people coming back to. You’re busy enough as it is and this won’t happen by magic. You will have to have someone do this. Which means you’ll have to pay someone to do this. You’ll have to spend time supervising that person. You will have to very familiar with what’s happening on your site(s) and be planning out content that you want to deliver. It takes time and money to do all this. And so why are you doing this? What are your expectations? Many business people think that social media is another form of marketing. It’s not. It’s about building a community. It’s about communicating information to help your customers stay close to you and, if you do a good job at that, bring in new customers. My best clients who use social media to its maximum advantage focus on customer service first, and marketing second. Social media is just another way, another tool, for keeping your community close. Maybe you have a better way to do this. Maybe you frequent trade shows, conferences, send emails, make a lot of phone calls…whatever. You don’t have to have a social media presence. But if you do, make sure you’re answering the above three questions. 
Interested in hiring my company for your next tech project? You better be careful. My company’s been in business for over seventeen years. We’ve done hundreds and hundreds of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) implementations. We’re like any technology firm. You’d think with that kind of experience we’d have it down pat. But we don’t. Every year we have great projects…and bitter disasters. We try and try to avoid those bad projects. But we still have them. You don’t want have a bad project, right? Here are a few things to consider before hiring your next technology partner. My people are very good at what they do. We know the software that we sell inside-out. We can customize it with our eyes closed. We’re excellent at training. If you hire us I promise you we’ll get your company super productive with this technology. You’ll be doing things quicker and better and be way more productive than you ever were. But be careful. I’m greedy. Sometimes I want the work…too badly. I’ll nod my head and agree to things that I shouldn’t. I’ll make assumptions and cross my fingers under the table hoping that I’m right. I go into most projects feeling well less than 100% confident that the project will succeed. To me, every project is a gamble. If it pays off I profit. If not, I take my lumps and move on. Are most IT firms like me? I’m sure many wouldn’t admit it. But the numbers don’t lie. If we were all less greedy, and more honest with our clients we’d be seeing better project success. But that’s just not reality. For example, I noticed soon at the beginning of a recent project that timelines were too tight. The client was asking too much of his people. Resources were thin. Other projects were going on. Work was scheduled to happen through the Christmas and New Year’s holidays. I knew from experience that people are never productive at that time of year. I knew that there were too many distractions to keep his people focused on the project at hand. Still I said nothing. I should’ve battled to make the timelines more reasonable. I should’ve explained that, other than the SEC or IRS, there are few reasons to kill your people over a deadline. I should have told him how our best projects always built in enough extra days to accommodate unforeseen problems. I didn’t say any of this. I didn’t want to rock the boat. And the client wasn’t pressing. I also didn’t say anything when the inevitable happened too: scope creep. I watched silently as the client’s internal project manager agreed to change after change to the plan as users tested the application and made their suggestions. She was just trying to please. Instead she was hurting the project. I should’ve put my foot down and drawn a line in the sand. I should’ve pointed to other successful projects, where proposed scope changes were documented, reviewed and approved for implementation…in later phases. Again I didn’t want to rock the boat. So I let it all happen. And here’s what eventually happened: the project failed. So did I learn? Will this ever happen again? Yes it will. Why? Because sometimes your technology partner doesn’t say what he or she should be saying. Sometimes we’re too greedy. Can you trust your technology partner? Sure. But keep your eyes open. Question what they say. Remember their agenda may not always be consistent with yours. Be aware of scope creep. Don’t let your project go unattended. And ask the right questions before you hire. What would those questions be? Ah! Stay tuned….I’ll reveal those next week! Gene Marks is a columnist, author, and small business owner. Gene’s weekly columns for The New York Times, Forbes, The Huffington Post, Inc Magazine, FOX Business, and Philadelphia Magazine are read by thousands of small and medium sized business owners around the country.