I Have A Dream. What’s Yours?

In respect to Martin Luther King day on January 19th, I’m doing a play on the speech “I have a dream”.

My dream for small businesses is to have them run as smoothly as possible with little to no interruption from hackers, spammers, phishing, natural events such as tornadoes, power outages, floods, rogue/untrained employees, etc.

Small business these days are being hammered on all sides. Government oversight and regulations, corporations buying out “mom and pop” businesses, hackers attempting to steal your private, hard-earned customer data and assets. Even nations are involved. Just last week, I had over 1100 attempts to illegally access my website. The attacks came from Russia, China, Bulgaria, Singapore, the United Kingdom and the United States.

So I highly recommend you do these four things as soon as possible…

1. Make sure your website is protected using technical measures such as Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificates for encryption, web application firewalls (WAF) to filter and block malicious traffic, security plugins or software to scan for threats, content delivery networks (CDN) to block DDoS attacks, and enacting regular updates and patches to the CMS, plugins, and website themes. If you are not sure if it is, either check with your web hosting services, or with us to make sure you are protected.

2. If you have a shared IP through your web hosting provider, consider getting a dedicated IP specific for your business. Case in point, a client was getting email bounced from a large client due to a website not associated to them being on the same IP as them. This other website had their IP blacklisted which also blacklisted my client’s. It took a considerable periood of time to track down the issue.

3. Consider access control to your website through 2-factor security for logging in.

4. Make sure you have recent backups of all your computer systems, website and data.

Call me at 615-443-4842 if you have questions or need help implementing any of the above.

While I’m not an expert on governments, corporations, or hackers, I have a great track record helping “mom and pop” businesses in these areas.

In the case of government regulations, I have trusted business associates such as bookkeepers, wealth management teams and CPAs that can assist.

For corporations, we help businesses in their transition if they are purchased by other companies.

As far as protection from hackers, phishing attempts, viruses, etc., we have multiple layers of protection from zero-trust browser extensions to software that works with AI along with real security experts to protect your business from threats,

If you are interested in learning more about securing your computer systems send an email to jnay@jimnay.com. You can also call or text us at 615-443-4842.

Best,
Jim Nay