Posts written by:

Mariola Czerkawska

Privacy & Security Awareness Training

January 23, 2019

A new era of privacy emerged in 2018 with the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) coming into force alongside mandatory data breach regulations in Canada. These policy changes are now impacting the technology investments of small and medium-sized organizations. But even with sophisticated technology, data breaches continue to happen. Find out what you can do to…

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Spear Phishing in Italy

August 1, 2018

Smart Dolphins IT Solutions provides live, instructor-led training on cybersecurity best practices. The story here was avoidable.   However, uninformed employees represent the weakest link when it comes to cybersecurity risk at small to medium sized businesses today. A simple and cost-effective defense against cyber-attacks is to invest in employee training. In this blog post, we share the details…

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Sextortion Email Phishing Scam

July 30, 2018

This bogus blackmail email phishing scam has probably already landed in either your work or personal email account. But it’s not too late to dedicate a few minutes refreshing your email phishing scam awareness. In 2017, 76% of organizations experienced phishing attacks. Knowb4 The content of the email varies but here’s the synopsis: You receive an email…

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Inactive accounts

July 17, 2018

Scenario: An employee left your organization years ago and their user account is still enabled. This poses a couple of problems, let’s take a deep dive. Why inactive accounts in your Active Directory pose significant risks? First and foremost, an enabled dormant user account is like leaving your door open a crack. A past employee…

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MSP 501 2018

June 27, 2018

We are delighted to report that Smart Dolphins was named to the 2018 Channel Futures MSP 501 list of the top IT providers in the world. Wow! Awesome news for the POD – a smart and friendly IT support team hailing from Vancouver Island.   So, how does a Managed Service Provider (MSP) rank on…

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Does your business have a BCDR?

June 15, 2018

Living on Vancouver Island, we’re all used to talking about earthquakes. Many of us have invested in an emergency plan and supplies. But what about our businesses? Every business should have a Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery (BCDR) plan. It does not need to be elaborate. It needs to cover Recovery Point Objectives (RPO), Recovery…

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Office 365 email phishing attack

May 22, 2018

An email phishing scam that exploited Microsoft Office 365 has recently come to our attention. Last week, a local bookkeeper’s email account was hacked. Here’s the timeline and a summary of events: On Friday, the bookkeeper received an email from someone that she was expecting a message from. She thought it looked fishy, so she replied to…

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Is your Business Ready for Changes to Data Breach Regulations?

May 17, 2018

The Government of Canada published the final version of its breach of security safeguards regulations on April 18, 2018 as an amendment to the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA) of 2000. Starting Nov. 1, 2018, PIPEDA will require organizations that suffer a data breach involving personal information to: Report the breach to the Privacy Commissioner of Canada.…

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How IT impacts productivity

May 1, 2018

Productivity While there are still many “old school” law firms, technology is pervasive at Pearlman Lindholm. With 16 busy lawyers and many more supporting staff, the diverse and progressive firm has many technology elements that Smart Dolphins has integrated and supported. Firm-wide downtime would be costly with over 40 people utilizing the network. Also, recurring…

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IT Budgets

April 25, 2018

Over the years, we’ve met with hundreds of Vancouver Island’s business leaders and the cost of IT services is always top-of-mind. Small-to-medium sized businesses are either in a position where they are spending too much and not getting results, or they aren’t allocating any resources to technology and IT has little impact. In both scenarios,…

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