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Companies that want to employ at-home workers for their call centers to save money and reduce the hassles of office space have to look at security considerations. In addition to thorough vetting of the agents and their equipment, organizations also need to ensure that the security is top-notch. A cloud-based contact center combats these issues. Here are some considerations:

• Will it anger customers to have an agent who can’t speak clear English? Not only does poor speech of the employee drive some

Editor’s Note: In this week’s guest blog security expert Robert Siciliano explains how to protect your IT systems and your business from hardware failure. To learn more, download our new e-book, “5 Things Small Businesses Need to Know about Disaster Recovery.”

It is September and that means National Preparedness Month: an ideal time to get involved in your community’s safety. Make plans to stay safe, and this includes keeping ongoing communications alive. National Preparedness Month culminates Se

Once you become active online…and especially once you become “connected” with a smartphone…your privacy will be in sizzling hot demand—and in fact, you can bet that as you read this, it is already being invaded in ways that you couldn’t possibly imagine. Here are some of those ways, provided by wired.com:

1. Someone could be collecting information on you via a keylogger: It’s a little tool that records your keystrokes, that someone secretly inserts into your computer. A keylogger, however, can also

National Preparedness Month is happening right now. It’s the perfect time to take action for you and your community. It’s all about making plans to remain safe, and when disasters do strike, to keep communications going. September 30th is the culmination of NPM, with the National PrepareAthon! Day.

If a burglar sees your Facebook status that you are traveling on vacation and then enters your house, and takes $10,000 worth of valuables, it’s safe to say you as the homeowner facilitated the theft.

Some of us remember college dorm days, when students were envied if they had their own typewriter. These days, college students must have a personal laptop computer, and a smartphone, and their lives revolve around these connected devices.  Such dependency should be proactively protected from loss or theft.  Campus security now means more than just being beware of who might be hiding in the bushes at night.

When you send your college kid off into the world, you want them to be prepared for life’s

Maybe you don’t mind the ads for that bicycle rack following you around in cyberspace after you visited a site for all things bike, but browser trackers (“cookies”) also create a profile of you that gets sold to other advertisers and third parties.

Are you doomed to be stalked forever by bike ads? This is caused by third-party cookies. You can use third party software such as CCleaner, which can identify third-party cookies and clean out the cookies in your hard drive. It’s the third-party cookie

Let’s look at the top 10 scams (random order).

Charity

• A fraudster claims to represent a charitable organization.
• Such scams can operate ring-style, such as one out in Colorado some years ago in which women wearing crisp white dresses that resembled the dresses nurses used to wear, and also wearing white caps (like a nurse), solicited motorists for money by walking around at stoplights holding out tin cans that had a label on them like “Help Fight Drugs.” Many people were fooled by the white outfit

So, when you think about summer travel safety, what comes to mind? Which beach you’ll be lounging on? Sunburns? Shark attacks? While sunburns and vacation plans are rational concerns most have when traveling during the summer, shark attacks are a new one.

With all of the news of recent shark attacks, people are now anxious about wading into the waters, despite the fact that the chances of getting mauled by a shark are a whopping one in 3.7 million. No guarantees, of course, but your odds are look

Did you know that sometimes, the apps you use for your smartphone have access to your personal information and are capable of sharing it? Are you aware that your privacy can be invaded across the network board? That includes Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Google+ and more.

And how can you tell which applications can do this? MyPermissions can tell you. Once you load this and do some setting up, you’ll see which apps on your device has access to your information.

For instance, it’s not jus

Those were the days when all parents had to worry about was the creepy guy lurking near the playground. Now parents have to worry about creeps all over the world reaching their kids via computer. And there’s more to worry about. Here’s what to teach your kids:

• Screen names should not be revealing about location, age or even gender. Never use the full name. Choose a name that would never outright point to the user, such as “Chris J,” when everyone knows the user as Tina Jones. “Chris” can make Tin

Let’s cut to the chase (never mind how you misplaced your phone): There are several ways to sign out of your Google accounts remotely. It takes three steps, and you’ll need the desktop version of Google.

• On a mobile use a browser opposed to the Gmail/Google app and sign in at gmail.com.
• Seek out “Desktop version” at the bottom of the window/browser. Click it. You may need to login again.
• At the very bottom you will see “Recent Activity” in the right corner. Look below that to see “Details.” Click t

You’ve been “Googled.” No matter how small a speck you think you are in this universe, you have without a doubt created an online footprint that is attached to your name. Chances are high that someone out there has followed this footprint of yours via a Google search.

Whether by a business colleague, family member or even a significant other, it’s reasonable to assume that your name will be “searched” online for personal information about you. But, what are the results of these searches? Are you

There is good news for the tech-unsavvy out there: Google has made their privacy settings easier to work with. This day has not come a moment too soon. “My Account” is Google’s new dashboard.

When you use any Google account, the giant company collects information on you. The new dashboard will reveal what information this is. My Account also has other privacy related features; check it out first chance that you get. It has the following three sections.

Security

• If you get locked out of your Google

When someone online presents as a different person than their true self, this is called catphishing, and it occurs on online dating sites.

• Google the name of the object of your interest. Obviously, “Kelly Smith” and “John Miller” won’t get you far, but “Jaycina McArthur” just might. What comes up?
• See if they have social media accounts, as these suggest they’re a real person. But the absence doesn’t prove they’re a phony, either. Not every legitimate person is into the social media thing.

Here are

According to a recent report from Pew Research, many Americans take privacy seriously—as in the cyber kind, but also offline.

• 9% of survey respondents thought they had strong control over how much of their personal information was collected and shared.
• 38% thought they had moderate control; 37% believed they had little control; 13% said they had zero control.
• 25% used temporary e-mail addresses or usernames for some online activities.
• 24% gave non-truthful information about themselves (e.g., when re

One of mankind’s greatest inventions (besides the wheel) is the Internet.

Unfortunately, with this marvelous invention comes the drawback of privacy—or shall we say, lack of.

The Internet is a wonderful tool, but users must fight to remain as anonymous as possible, because getting too much of yourself “out there” could lead to trouble. In fact, it’s a big business all in itself: tracking users’ data and selling it to advertisers. Now this may sound rather benign, because no matter how much or how

In this day and age, we should never hear someone proclaim, “Oh my God, my computer crashed! I lost everything!” You can’t lose something that’s been properly backed up.

So many people, including ones with businesses that rely upon cyber communication, continue to avoid backing up their digital data.

Nobody is exempt from the No. 1 rule of backing up your data. Anything could happen:

• Hard drive crash
• Accidental deletion
• Water damage
• Fire
• Theft (offline)
• Ransomware

The planning for digital disasters begin

Perhaps someone has told you that you need to “clear your cache,” but what does this mean and why should you do it? A cache is a folder of recently visited webpages, which is stored on your computer’s hard drive, and maintained by your Internet browser.

The purpose of a cache is to speed up the loading of webpages. Your computer’s hard drive collects data from websites that you visit, so that when you visit them again, certain aspects of the previously visited pages (such as graphics) don’t have

According to a new Intel Security study, more than 2,000 American parents and kids ages 8-16 were surveyed to unveil some interesting things.

• 79% of the juvenile respondents learned online safety from their parents.
• 35% of them said they’ve been a cyberbully.
• 27% of them said they have met, or would meet, a person in real life who they initially met online.

Technology is often blamed for all of this. But what drives these behaviors is the same force that drives the schoolyard bully to trip the bookw

At any given time, someone, somewhere, is probably googling you. This could be a former classmate, a neighbor, someone you’re trying to do business with, a relative, who knows?

Are you confident that whatever they find will be information that’s truly representative of you? Maybe if you have a really common name, it may be lost in cyber muddle, but the more unusual your name is (or how the first name is spelled), the easier it will be to find you. If you want a clean online presence, there are th