As a Cage Data customer, you probably know that we’ve run Symantec’s antivirus product for years. It’s been a great product as the cyber security landscape has been plagued by ever changing strategies employed by the people that create viruses and vulnerabilities that have even effected the way we think about processor chips.

As the cyber security landscape has changed, we’ve been watching the vendors who design software and hardware to protect their customers. Today we’re excited to announce that we’ve partnered with Sophos! Sophos’ cloud-based platform, Sophos Central, brings together their complete suite of products into a single platform which leverages Synchronized Security to make Intercept X, their endpoint security software, and their XG Firewall products work together.

Not only does Sophos offer security for your computers, servers and networks, but with Phish Threat, Cage Data offers customers phishing awareness training so that your employees know how to detect a malicious email. Phishing is the number 1 source of malicious attacks against businesses today, and the number 1 prevention method for these attacks is training to know what they look like. With Phish Threat, Cage Data assembles and sends out monthly simulated phishing attacks with follow-up training for anyone who clicks the links on the attack.

We will be transitioning all clients currently using Symantec Endpoint Protection over to Sophos Intercept X for both workstations and servers over the next 90 days.

If you have any questions or want to learn more about adopting Sophos’ Synchronized Security platform in your company, please reach out to us.

Office 365 makes a great platform for most of your business’s needs. If you are sending email to a lot of people though, you’ll need to start looking at a mail marketing service, like Mailchimp or Constant Contact. But how do you get all your contacts from Office 365 into your new Mailchimp account? Below are some easy steps to export your contacts into something that can be imported into a mail marketing platform:

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If you tune into any tech news sources this week, the only thing people are talking about is Meltdown and Spectre, two new vulnerabilities that every modern processor is affected by.

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It sounds like some new blues rock band, but it’s the latest in attacks against wifi technology. I mean, we all knew we weren’t really as safe as we pretended we were; sending data through the air is inherently leaky. That’s why radio works in the first place, but now the measures we thought gave us reasonable security, don’t.

Overview

• A new vulnerability affecting all WPA2 connected clients means an attacker could compromise clients even on password protected wireless networks.
• This targets client-side systems and is unlikely to affect routers except in bridged mode in some instances.
• Microsoft has already released a patch in their October 10th security updates.
• Apple is currently working on a patched release to be released on all MacOS, iOS and tvOS devices. AirPort routers are unaffected.
• HTTPS and VPNs continue to keep you secure as they always have and provide an effective mitigation technique.

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This is the fourth part in a series on shifting our thoughts about Monitoring. All of this came from a talk I gave at GalaxZ’17 in Austin, TX earlier this year. You can find part one, “Ein Minuten Bitte”, part 2, “Empathetic Monitoring”, and part 3, “New Partners” from their respective links. But if you’re ready to read on, we’ll talk about…

Reformation

That’s a heavy word. But I want to be clear about how much work goes into this process. There’s risk involved here, too. Change, being introduced the wrong way, can cause schism instead of reform. You’ll notice in the 16th century the Protestant Reformation didn’t create a new and improved Roman Catholic Church, but rather a whole assortment of new Protestant sects from Lutheran to Baptist to Pentecostal.

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This is part three in a series about monitoring all coming from a talk that I gave in Austin, TX at GalaxZ’17. In part one I introduced the problem and in part two I discussed how we should start to change. Today we’re looking at who, in our organization are our…

New Partners

Hopefully at this point you’re on board with me. And maybe you’re thinking “Sure, sounds good, but where do I start? Who do I even talk to?” And that’s an awesome place to be, you’re eager to move forward and that energy is going to be needed for really encouraging organizational change.

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I spent this past week in the beautiful city of Krakow, Poland for the spectacular DevConf Poland. Thinking this is a new conference is far from the truth, as the organizers have run DevDays since 2011, changing the name this year. From what I hear, they have not changed not the fantastic experience.

I was accepted to give my talk, Fending Off Zombies With OTP, and speaking at the conference was one of the best speaking experiences to date.

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We built howsmy.email for you to see if your customers are getting your email. Check it out today and Schedule a Consultation to have Cage Data’s team of email experts make sure your customers get every message.

Email is the heart and soul of business communication. Even as tools like Slack and FlowDock seek to take over messaging within businesses, email is the go to messaging platform for interacting with clients, vendors and partners, and it’s been that way for nearly 30 years.

Once you hit the send button, emails go through a few steps before they get into the receivers inbox. At each step a number of tests occur to verify that 1) you are who you say you are; 2) you aren’t sending something malicious, such as a virus; and 3) you aren’t sending spam.

What exactly is spam? The simplest definition is “any email that is sent someone without the consent of the receiver.” Every message, on it’s way to the inbox, goes through a spam filter. The spam filter runs each message through a series of rules which look at the where the email is coming from (the server and the person), what information is in the header of an email (the part which stores information for the computer to read) as well as in the subject and body of the email. Each rule gives a score for the email. Just like in golf, the higher the score the worse the results and when the score gets too high, the message get put into the junk mail folder.

You’re not sending spam though. So why are emails still going to the junk mail folder? Or worse, why aren’t messages getting received at all? According to Return Path’s 2017 Deliverability Benchmark Report, 24% of emails don’t get into the received inbox. Of that, only 8% gets put into the junk mail folder, leaving 16% that never goes anywhere. So why aren’t your customers, vendors and partners receiving your emails?

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This is part two in a series about monitoring stemming from a talk that I gave in Austin, TX at GalaxZ’17. In part one I initially brought up the point of what I think is terrible in the current world of monitoring and why I think it should be changed. Here we’ll look more closely at one way how to do that. Today we talk about…

Empathetic Monitoring

Where we’re at right now, we’re tracking our System Metrics. Hopefully many of us are monitoring more than just the actual box health and are tracking things like User Latency, Database Performance and page load times, but it’s still fight with our businesses to see the value of the data. We need to start monitoring Business Metrics. When you tell an organization that you want to start monitoring the vital signs they care about it’s a much easier sell.

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This will be the first in a series of blog entries from me about changing how you think about monitoring in your tech business. All of this comes from the talk I gave at GalaxZ’17 this year in Austin, TX. I’ll setup the general monitoring situation as it is, and present to you my thoughts about what needs to change. In further parts of this series I’ll actually get in a little further about how to make these changes. And now keep reading for Part 1, What sucks and why:

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