I normally don’t Blog my titles in caps, unless I consider something significant. This one is really large. A vulnerability has been discovered called "Heartbleed". It is so big, many of you probably heard about it on the news since it affects close to 500,000 websites. Without going into detail, this has been around for over 2 years and effectively caused ANY internet website you have gone to and signed in has had its password files stolen and decrypted. They just fixed it this Monday.

Many sites (Google, Amazon, Yahoo, etc.) have made the necessary security certificate changes to lock them down, but it doesn’t prevent the damage that has been done.

We STRONGLY recommend that you change ALL of your internet login passwords to prevent any financial, proprietary, or other information from being taken from you.

Also, BEFORE you log into ANY websites that have https: in front of them, you want to make sure they are safe. How can you easily tell? Go to this link and type in your site and it will let you know:

http://filippo.io/Heartbleed/

If it comes up UNSAFE, do not use the site and be sure to alert the support team of the site as well.

For those of you who run websites with logins for your customers or clients, you will want to update your security certificates immediately as anything before April 7th are rendered useless.

At Renascence IT Consulting, we constantly monitor threats both large and small that could affect your personal, and business information. Feel free to contact us for more information.

More on the story:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=300645082

Thank you to our clients, partners, and friends that have allowed Renascence IT to be around for its FOUR year old anniversary!

Times have changed. Even in this small time frame the "cloud" has moved in on small businesses. This is allowing them to have a serious option of not needing huge, powerful hardware in house any longer for mail, files, accounting, and other office necessities. Devices such as smart phones and tablets have reached a point where many companies can deploy those instead of laptops or desktops to its employees. As a result, first views of websites are not done by computers, but by these portable machines, adding to the need for companies to have mobile friendly versions of their sites. Finally, malware and viruses have gotten more invasive, more lucrative for criminals, and much harder to detect and remove from machines.

If your company is stuck in 2000, 2005, or even 2010 technology, feel free to contact us to make sure your not behind the times, suffering data breaches or production slow downs.

We look forward seeing what the IT industry is like for small businesses in 4 years and hope you can make that journey with us as well.