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G-Suite Users Can View Employee Productivity With Work Insights

October 3, 2018 by Joseph Martin

Google has recently made some changes and improvements to its G-Suite. It introduces new tools designed to allow managers and admins greater visibility into how the people in their organizations use the G-Suite.

Currently, the “Work Insight” tool is available in beta and displays information on how G-Suite is deployed at the team level.

While this will be a boon to all organizations, it will be especially valuable for organizations moving from legacy tools to the G-Suite. It will also serve to shine a light on teams or individual employees who could benefit from additional training on specific applications and provide valuable information on cross-team collaborations.

Where collaboration is concerned, the thinking is that admins would be able to see, for example, how many members of a sales team are working collaboratively with the marketing department. They could also see whether that collaboration is happening via face to face meetings or via co-created documents.

In addition to the Work Insight tool, Google also announced the availability of the G-Suite Security Center, which is an investigative tool that provides admins with a dashboard they can use to monitor a variety of security metrics.

The two big advantages to the new Investigation tool are:

It gives admins the power to scale an incident response as needed, up to and including scaling it across an entire domain

It adds integrated remediation to the detection and prevention capabilities already available to admins in the G-Suite.

Taken together, these changes should make life much easier for both managers and admins, providing better data which can be transformed into hard-hitting business information. If you use the G-Suite at all, be sure to check out these new tools at your next available opportunity. Both are excellent additions.

Joseph Martin

President & CEO
I hope you enjoyed this article. My mission is to take your stress away from dealing with IT problems. Call (252) 565-1235 or send me a message at our contact us page if you have a question, comment or want help.

Gmail Releases New Confidential Mode

August 29, 2018 by Joseph Martin

Google has introduced a new Gmail feature called “Confidential Mode,” which seeks to make sending and receiving important or sensitive emails more secure. Unfortunately, it may have inadvertently created as many problems as it solves.

Here’s how the new feature works, and why you may be leery of using it:

To send a confidential email, compose your message as normal, and then, click the “lock” icon located at the bottom of the email screen. When this button is pressed, you’ll be presented with a number of options that will enable you to specify a self-destruct time ranging from one day to five years. The email will auto-delete after the amount of time specified.

You’ll also be able to specify whether the email requires a password to open, and of course, giving you the ability to set that password. Also, a message sent in Confidential mode cannot be forwarded to any other user or be printed out.

The new service works across all email systems because Confidential messages aren’t actually sent. The user will get a notification that they’ve received a confidential mail, and a link to click to access it, which points back to Google’s own servers where the email is housed.

Given this, the sender of the message also has the ability to selectively remove access to confidential emails if one was inadvertently sent to the wrong recipient.

All of that sounds great in theory, but there’s a problem. That’s exactly how phishing attacks work.

Security professionals have sounded the alarm that hackers will quickly begin spoofing Google’s new service, pointing the links in their messages toward their own servers. When users are prompted to provide their login credentials to see the message, they’ll be handing access to their email account over to the hackers. Google has not yet responded to or commented on this flaw in their new system. Use with caution.

Joseph Martin

Click Rates For Spam Emails Are Increasing

August 14, 2018 by Joseph Martin

F-Secure recently published a new report, and their findings are disturbing.

The click rates on spam emails increased to 14.2 percent for the second half of 2017, up from 13.4 percent reported in the first half of 2017.

The increase seems to be driven by two factors.

First, more intense targeting of smartphone users, who are typically more distracted and not paying as much attention when opening and reading emails.

Second, a slight increase in sophistication. For instance, an email that appears to come from a known sender is 12 percent more likely to be opened and responded to, so hackers are using this approach more often.

Even so, the report isn’t all bad news. While spam is still the most common means of attack, it’s highly inefficient, relying on brute force (volume) rather than an abundance of sophistication. Second, the report reveals that 85 percent of malicious attachments are made up of just five file types:

*.7z

*.PDF

*.XLS

*.DOC

*.ZIP

Knowing this, a savvy user who’s paying attention can more easily avoid falling into the trap of the hackers.

Other highlights from the report include:

46 percent of all spam campaigns are related to online dating

23 percent contain the malicious attachments described above

31 percent contain links to malicious websites

Sean Sullivan, an F-Secure Security Advisor had this to say about the report:

“We’ve reduced criminals to spam, one of the least effective methods of infection. Anti-malware is containing nearly all commoditized bulk threats. And honestly, I don’t see anything coming over the horizon that could lead to another gold rush, so criminals are stuck with spam.”

Overall, the report is bad news mixed with some good. One thing it clearly underscores is the continuing importance of ongoing email education for all employees of companies of any size.

Joseph Martin

E-Mail Is A Big Threat To Your Organization

August 4, 2018 by Joseph Martin

Mimecast’s 2018 “State of Email Security” report is out, and although it’s contents are hardly a surprise, the news it contains is mostly bad.

For starters, it confirms what most IT professionals already know:

Email continues to be a big threat for organizations of all sizes.

Unfortunately, the C-Suite (CEO’s, CIO’s, CFO’s, and the like) are a major part of the problem, representing a significant weak link in Enterprise security. Not only are they a prime target for hackers, but according to the survey, 40 percent of respondents agreed that their organization’s CEO was a painfully “weak link” in their organization’s cyber-security operations.

Just as alarming, 31 percent of respondents said that C-level employees are very likely to have accidentally sent sensitive or proprietary information to the wrong person, a statistic up 9 percent from last year.

In addition to that, email is the primary means by which ransomware winds up getting inside company networks. This comes with a staggering 92 percent of successful ransomware attacks arriving via that channel, resulting in three or more days of downtime for the impacted companies.

Phishing attacks also continue to be a major issue, with 90 percent of respondents reporting an increase in the number of phishing attacks they were subjected to.

In light of these statistics, one would imagine that companies would be devoting significant resources to countering the threat. Unfortunately, that’s just not happening. Sure, money is being spent on infrastructure, but humans are the weakest link in this chain, and not just in the C-Suite. According to the survey, only 11 percent of organizations continuously train their employees on how to spot cyberattacks, and just over half (52 percent) perform training just once a year.

Matthew Gardiner, a cyber-resilience expert at Mimecast, summarizes it this way :

“Security awareness is an important part of any high-functioning security program. But like all security controls, there is no silver bullet solution. The best security programs seek a balance between technical controls, boosting their human firewalls, and having IT enabled business processes that are resilient to failures, whether man-made or caused by technology.”

Indeed.

Joseph Martin

Apps In Gmail Have Full Access To Read Your Emails

July 14, 2018 by Joseph Martin

File this one away under “watch your permissions.” It’s recently come to light that an unknown number of third party apps have access to read emails sitting in your Gmail account.

While the practice is not new, things like this are coming under increased scrutiny in the wake of Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica incident.

Here are the important details to bear in mind:

Apps that can read your email DO require explicit user permissions. You have to agree to allow these apps access to your Gmail account.

Once you do allow access, you’re giving both humans and computers access to not only read your messages but create new folders and even send emails out using your account. These details are generally buried in the fine print, and most users don’t realize exactly what they’re allowing when they accept.

Google has not made exact figures known, so it’s unclear exactly how many apps on the Play Store currently have this permission, nor is it known how many apps were denied in Google’s vetting process.

Currently, there are no known instances of a third party abusing Gmail permissions and doing anything inappropriate with the data they’re being given access to.

It’s not just Google. Most major free email providers have similar arrangements.

You can check your permissions via your smartphone and revoke access to any app that looks suspicious, or that you’re not comfortable giving that level of permission to. The downside, of course, is that revoking permissions will probably cause the app to stop working.

As ever, ensuring your privacy requires a proactive approach. It’s foolish to assume that a company (any company) will be as careful with your privacy as you would be personally. Be aware and stay vigilant. At the end of the day, that’s the best way to minimize intrusions to your privacy.

Joseph Martin

G-Mail Users Will Soon Have To Use New Design

June 26, 2018 by Joseph Martin

Change is coming, and not everyone is happy about it. Recently, Google redesigned its G-mail interface, and since then, they’ve allowed their free users to opt into the new changes. G-Suite users may or may not see the option to try the new interface, depending on whether their administrators have enabled the option and made it visible.

The company just announced that beginning in July, 2018, administrators will be required to give all users the ability to opt into the new interface. Then, sometime in September 2018, all users will be switched to the new interface by default, although the option to switch back to the old interface will be available for approximately one month. After that, the option to use the old interface will vanish, and all G-Suite users will only be able to use G-Mail using the new interface.

The company has not made any official announcement regarding users who have free G-Mail accounts. However, most industry insiders expect that given the timetable outlined above for G-Suite users, free G-Mail users can expect an email or other communication from Google about when the option to use the old interface will be going away for good. Ultimately, Google means for everyone to use their new interface design, and will certainly enforce that.

Google’s handling of the change has been exceptional. Change comes to us all, and in business, sometimes it can descend at a terrifying pace. Only by slowing things down to a more human scale can you give your employees time to adapt and grow accustomed to the coming change.

Kudos to Google for a job well done, and business owners, take note. Change may be inevitable, but it doesn’t have to be scary. Just give your employees time to get used to the idea.

Joseph Martin

G-Suite Users Can View Employee Productivity With Work Insights

Gmail Releases New Confidential Mode

Click Rates For Spam Emails Are Increasing

E-Mail Is A Big Threat To Your Organization

Apps In Gmail Have Full Access To Read Your Emails

G-Mail Users Will Soon Have To Use New Design

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