In my final blog as the Head Nerd for N-central and now your newest Product Manager for N-central, I thought it would be time to update my previous blog from July, 2021 and provide a few more details as to why hardening the N-central server—and for that matter any on-premises server that has an operating system—is critically important.
In honor of World Password Day, we asked our Head Nerds for their top password-related tips and thoughts. One thing they could all pretty much agree on is that passwords shouldn’t be replaced, but that they should be supplemented with MFA. Here’s what else they had to say.
Patching devices, whether you’re an internal IT team or an MSP, is something that takes time, costs money, and honestly isn’t a particularly pleasant job. Different products do different jobs at patching, but no matter what you use, you should always make sure you patch in a timely manner. If we go back ten years, it used to take upwards of 30 days for people to exploit security vulnerabilities, but in recent years, we’ve seen that decrease to 15 days.
Working at N-able for over 17 years, I’m not really considered a “spring chicken”. And I’m okay with that. I’m okay with the fact that I am getting older and I have learned to embrace this. It has been said that after the age of 40, a women’s metabolism decreases by 2% a year, and women lose muscle mass to the tune of 1% a year. What does this mean?
To be clear, SMB V1 has been deprecated, unsecure, and not recommended for a long time. But Microsoft is now taking the next step towards removing it from Windows entirely. In recent years, Microsoft had stopped installing SMB1 server on all Windows versions by default; however, they have kept installing the SMB1 client in Home and Pro versions of Windows. This was meant to allow end users to connect to various devices, including NAS, which only supported SMB1.
Our previous blog provided an outline of the current phishing trends and potential consequences of not being aware of them. This article, however, takes a deep dive into a particularly dangerous type of attack. There is a large amount of phishing that is targeting webmail users on non-free mail domains in an attempt to syphon out their credentials for later use.
On April 5, 2022, Microsoft announced their new Windows Autopatch feature to take the burden of patching off the shoulders of overwhelmed IT departments. With a planned released date of July 2022, it’s worth getting educated about this new service from Microsoft and what its potential impacts on the MSP ecosystem will be. Spoiler alert: It’s not that big of a deal.
