Some Hackers Aren’t Malicious
Knoxville IT support can help protect your business from hackers— even those who are more “prank-prone” than anything else. Ever heard of “Stackoverflowin?” He’s a hacker who recently took over some 150,000 unsecured printers as a means of raising “hacking awareness.” His message was simple: your printer is unsecured, and if you want to keep from being exploited, it’s to your advantage that you secure your technology. He did this by printing messages of a “humorous” variety from various receipt printers and desktop printers he was able to hack.
There aren’t a lot of guys (or girls) with a humanitarian aim to their hacking. Maybe the key to Stackoverflowin’s proactive hacks is his poorly chosen hacker name. If he were “Blaze” or something like that, it’s more likely he’d be crashing bank servers or something. Here’s the point: you can’t afford to sustain the losses of “prank”/”humanitarian” hacks any more than you can afford to sustain the losses from legitimate hacks. Did Stackoverflowin take the time to ensure all his hacking shenanigans wouldn’t be bad for business? When he hacked receipt printers, was he sure to hack them only when there were no customers in a given store? Was he sure that what he did wouldn’t tie printers up even as other services were required of those devices? Probably not.
But he does make a good point, and it’s one that your business— small or large— should consider. There are many ways for malicious hackers to break into your operations. As a matter of fact, some of those ways aren’t even difficult— they don’t require any “pernicious” element. Hackers can easily break in just because they understand the technological topography, and those they’re hacking don’t. Knoxville IT support provided through professional MSPs can help you secure areas that are wide open which you don’t even know about.
Areas of Lax Security
As an example, Stackoverflowin’s primary means of hacking involved:
- Breaking into companies without a firewall
- Printers with IPP ports
- Line printer daemon (LPD) ports
- 9100 ports left open to external connections
If any of these seem a little bit esoteric, the others might as well be in Cyrillic. But when you work with a professional MSP who specializes in security protection, not only do such security problems evaporate, you’ve got the advantage of professional veneer to inform safeguarded solutions.
Technology Marches On
Something else to consider is that cloud computing solutions facilitate an expansion of technological utility. You’re naturally going to have more security weaknesses open for exploitation. When you’ve got more entries into a given system, you’ll have to develop more security parameters to safeguard them. While internal IT divisions can help, they’ll also have to work on maintaining operations and proactively expanding your brand. This means even if they cover all their bases, there’s still likely to be several “unaccounted for” security holes for which their accountability means nothing. But a professional solution’s accountability can save you money should an exploitation occur.
As you go about sourcing Knoxville IT support, you might want to consider Allevia Technology. We offer cutting-edge, comprehensive solutions designed to safeguard your systems proactively— and against even the most pernicious, well-informed hackers. Contact us today for more information.
