Education Archives - NuTech Services LLC

Jun, 2019

Staff Education Goes a Long Way in Preventing Security Issues

In a perfect world, keeping your antivirus updated and having a good firewall in place would be enough to protect your business from cybersecurity threats.

Unfortunately, most attacks still come in through email, and can slip by your users. Even the most complex cybersecurity platforms used by massive corporations and governments can be foiled by a simple phishing attack, and your end-users are your last line of defense.

How Can an Employee Fall Victim?

Phishing attacks are designed to look real. An email might come in looking like a valid message from Paypal, a bank, a vendor, or even from another employee or client. Hackers use several tricks to make the email look real, such as spoofing the address or designing the content of the email to look legitimate.

Unfortunately, if the user clicks on the link in the email or downloads the attachment, they could open themselves and your company up to whatever threats contained within.

Commonly, this leads to stolen sensitive information, or installs malware on the device, or grants the hacker the ability to log into the user’s bank account.

While having strong IT security can reduce the amount of these phishing attacks that come in, a percentage can be tricky enough to bypass your firewalls and content filters, exposing your staff to situations that could your whole endeavor in

Educate Your Employees

It’s important to teach employees how to catch a phishing attack. We recommend sharing the following steps with your staff, or even printing them out and posting them around the office:

Carefully hover (don’t click!) over links and see if they go to a legitimate URL. If the email is from Paypal, a link should lead back to paypal.com or accounts.paypal.com. If there is anything strange between ‘paypal’ and the ‘.com’ then something is suspicious. There should also be a forward slash (/) after the .com. If the URL was something like paypal.com.mailru382.co/something, then you are being spoofed. Everyone handles their domains a little differently, but use this as a general rule of thumb:
1. paypal.com – Safe
2. paypal.com/activatecard – Safe
3. business.paypal.com – Safe
4. business.paypal.com/retail – Safe
5. paypal.com.activatecard.net – Suspicious! (notice the dot immediately after Paypal’s domain name)
6. paypal.com.activatecard.net/secure – Suspicious!
7. paypal.com/activatecard/tinyurl.com/retail – Suspicious! Don’t trust dots after the domain!
Check the email in the header. An email from Amazon wouldn’t come in as noreply@amazn.com. Do a quick Google search for the email address to see if it is legitimate.
Always be careful opening attachments. If there is an attachment or link on the email, be extra cautious.
Be skeptical of password alerts. If the email mentions passwords, such as “your password has been stolen,” be suspicious.

Phishing Simulation

Another great tactic is to have regular phishing simulations. This is where we create a series of fake phishing emails (don’t worry, it’s safe), and randomly send it to your staff. When someone falls for the attack, we send them educational information to help them prevent being tricked by a real one.

We’ve found this to be very effective, without taking a lot of time out of an employees already busy day.

Are you interested in helping to protect your staff from falling victim to phishing attacks? Give us a call at 810.230.9455.

Apr, 2019

Higher Education Using Technology to Manage Operations

Have you ever wondered how colleges and universities function at a technological level? With so many students, you might start to think about how these institutions secure data, ensure timely completion of degrees, and closely monitor student retention efforts, all in addition to the normal IT operations that you would see at any business.

The fact of the matter is that universities have a lot of industry-specific technology that goes into making a functional institution of higher education, and that’s without mentioning secure access to student records, maintaining the productivity suites in computer labs, and providing intuitive smart technology for better lectures. We know a guy who’s well-versed in the types of solutions utilized by institutions of higher education, and we think you might find what he has to say to be interesting.

Degree Progress Management
Each student that is matriculated into a degree program has to complete a set of requisite courses. These courses will vary drastically from program to program, but the fact remains that each student must complete these requirements if they hope to graduate with a degree. Some programs have electives (any course the student wants) or selectives (any course from a selected group of classes), which complicates the process of choosing classes and opens up the door for students to take courses that don’t necessarily fulfill their degree requirements.

To minimize the risk of this happening, real-time degree progress can be viewed through programs like DegreeWorks. This program can show students, faculty, and staff advisors how many credits and courses must be completed by a student, as well as which classes fulfill specific requirements. Students can even process “what if” reports, which can show them how their degree progress is affected by something like changing their major.

Student Retention
It’s not a stretch to say that some students enter higher education underprepared for the increased workload. Whether it’s because of students not knowing how to access the proper resources, needing educational supplements like tutors, or simply requiring a support system that the student doesn’t have at home or on-campus, student retention and persistence can be a challenge for many institutions.

In an effort to improve these statistics, student retention software can be used by faculty and staff to assign flags, create to-do lists, and make appointments with students who are in need of assistance or support. In this way, the support structure that many students need to succeed is both accessible and informative for them.

Online Learning
In today’s increasingly-connected world, online learning has become a viable alternative to traditional, or synchronous, learning. When we say “synchronous,” we mean the traditional lecture style of education, in which a student must be physically present in the classroom to participate in discussions. Asynchronous learning, which is significantly less structured and more of an “at your own pace” approach to education, has provided students with limited time and geographic resources an opportunity to learn at their own pace in a less structured environment.

Depending on the institution, the online learning application might be something like BlackBoard, Angel, or Brightspace, rebranded to suit the proprietary needs of the university. Either way, the end result is generally the same. Online learning uses a centralized environment for all of a student’s learning needs, providing access to message boards, learning modules, grade books, open educational resources, and so much more.

Again, we understand that not all of our readers have stakes in the education sector; we just wanted to share some interesting solutions that are used by professionals in this industry. Are there any other industries you want to learn more about? Let us know in the comments and be sure to subscribe for more great technology-related blogs.

Sep, 2016

How One Major Government Department is Revamping Its IT Infrastructure

After implementing their current infrastructure for almost a decade, the U.S. Department of Education have plans to upgrade, directing their attention toward ensuring that the new initiative keeps mobile capabilities as a high priority.

The current infrastructure, EDUCATE (Education Department Utility for Communications, Applications, and Technology Environment) was the first to move away from an IT environment owned by the government and operated by contractors, to one that’s owned and operated as a service by the contractor–in this case, Perot Systems.

Perot won the contract bid in 2007 for $400 million, and has since provided comprehensive managed service solutions to the Department of Education. Now, however, the Department is ready for a change.

Jason Gray, Chief Information Officer for the Education Department, cited the numerous changes made to IT technologies and capabilities since EDUCATE was implemented in 2007 (when he announced that there was interest for new proposals), as well as changes to goals shared the Department of Education.

The objectives of the new infrastructure, dubbed PIVOT, or the Portfolio of Integrated Value-Oriented Technology, were described in a request for information (RFI) distributed to potential providers. The new infrastructure should, according to the RFI, encourage innovation, optimize the cost to benefit ratio, and show flexibility to make integrating changes in requirements simple. As part of the new initiative, each aspect of the infrastructure (like oversight, hosting data, printing, network services, technical management and integration, and mobile services) will have its own contract written up.

Most of all, however, the Department of Education wants to focus on the mobile capabilities of their solutions. The RFI predicts a shift from a permanently established office space to an increased utilization of teleworking and hoteling (where workers gather temporarily in a shared space) as a result of the National Strategy for Reducing the Federal Government’s Real Estate Footprint. This would cause a shift of over 6,200 users away from an office environment, certainly achieving the objective of the National Strategy.

Migrating technology into a new workspace or implementing mobile and teleworking solutions clearly takes considerable planning, and in such cases, it’s best to consult with an expert in the field. NuTech Services has the experience necessary to ensure that your IT initiative goes off without a hitch, and that your solutions are optimized for maximum performance. Give NuTech Services a call today to see what we can do for your solutions for a lot less than $400 million.