For millions of people, password management and online security is opaque and maddening. Websites with password requirements tell you they have to be a specific number of characters long, be upper and lower case, have numbers and sometimes even special characters - like $#%^1mpo55ibleToRemember! So many people have scribbled passwords in the backs of notebooks shoved into their desk drawer. In many instances, these books or pieces of paper include passwords to sensitive accounts like bank and .gov accounts. In others, the accounts are associated with social media and other public-facing accounts. In the event of an account breach or a fire, the loss of these passwords can lead to firing or even loss of control of online accounts that directly impact how one makes ones living.
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- Written by: Norman Smit
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Coherent Marketing has worked with SCORE Raleigh for the past several years to help small businesses improve their online security. In an increasingly-connected world, small businesses are vulnerable to a range of malicious attacks. And because of this connectedness, an intrusion in one area can translate into a much broader problem. A successful malicious attack can be terminal to a small business.
Our online seminar is a cost-effective way to learn the basics that a small business needs to avoid a costly hack or ransomware.
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In 2016, the CEO of Coherent Marketing, Norman Smit, was invited by the Raleigh office of the SCORE small business mentoring organization to offer a series of seminars in the first quarter of 2017. The seminars, which will take place at libraries across Wake County has been titled "The Smartphone-Wielding Small Business Guide to Content Marketing".
GET THE SEMINAR SLIDES HERE.
The ground we cover includes:
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In an internet age, regular reviews of your company's digital footprint and how it may have been appropriated by bots scraping your content is important to do on a regular basis. Sites seeking to mash ransomware with customer reviews are now popping up. The way it works is your information is scraped from your site or social media pages and then a page created for your company. Reviewers can then post whatever they choose about your company. You are required to log into the site and 'claim' your listing. In some instances, you may be charged to transform your 'free' listing into some kind of service-based listing - for example, premium accounts have the additional options they can take when a negative review is posted. In many instances, the identities of the reviewers are obscured so that it is impossible to tell whether the reviewer is a real person or not, or an employee of the review site. An additional danger is the site may be actively soliciting you to claim the listing with incorrect information and requiring additional information with the goal of data mining, identity theft or levying charges to your bank account. Treat sites like these in the same way as you would treat spoofed emails from legitimate accounts you own such as your bank account and do not give them your information.
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Yahoo was hacked in 2014. Shamefully, the news was released only in September 2016. It was one of the biggest data breaches in history and even encrypted passwords were stolen. So, firstly, if you have a Yahoo account, change your Yahoo password now.
But the breach may impact you beyond just your Yahoo account. When Integrated Media Strategies builds websites for clients or helps them with their small business email accounts, we create long, randomized passwords like s0cnZS)XD'H[4RmkL. We'll get grumbling that they are impossible to remember. We usually spell out the cost of a site brought down by malware or that's been hacked because of poor security practices. "Username: Admin Password: Admin" is something we've seen too often. Clients will also entrust us with access to their hosting and other accounts, and when we see their passwords, it's often a variant of their children, dog or something like "Passw0rd". They reuse that same password everywhere to save the hassle of remembering multiple passwords, unaware of how a breach in one place can have a cascading impact on all their accounts.
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One area of the work we do is helping small and micro businesses as a digital communications service provider and coach. Having been involved in more than a dozen startups over my career, I know that money and resources are usually tight at startups. So nothing irks me more than getting the type of call I did recently from a client saying they were going to work with a 'SEO specialist' who had told them the web platform their site was built on was unsuitable for SEO, which stands for Search Engine Optimization, and that it needed to be redone and then they could get them page one rankings in a week.
The platform on which their site was built is a leading open-source solution well-suited to the application for which it was built. For small business owners, if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.
So let's look at the changing landscape of SEO and whether a technical solution will produce the results promised.
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