Welcome to Maniacs of Networking!
We are a team of experienced network consulting engineers. Here's how we can help scale up your business, while keeping all its data safe.
Network Administration
We maintain network performance by configuring and managing all your company's network appliances.
Hardware/Software Upgrades
Our engineers provide improved software and hardware solutions that boost performance and reliability.
Network Security Management
Protect sensitive client information and valuable internal data by making use of our qualified services.
Free Training
Setting up a secure network
Prevention is always better than cure, they always say. And this saying is also valid when it comes to network security. Once that a hacker has managed to connect to your company network, he will be able to do all sorts of nasty things.
He can use freely available software to get a list with all the devices which are connected to the same network, for example. Then, he can search the web, looking for various device vulnerabilities. Some applications can even determine the names of the previously accessed Wi-Fi networks, and hackers will use this information to set up their own hotspots that use identical SSIDs. Due to this, some of your wireless devices will connect to the new networks, giving the cyber villains full access to their data.
It goes without saying that all the shared network resources will be accessible to them as well. Those confidential documents which have been stored on your file server won't be private anymore. The guy would even be able to print 1,000 "you've been hacked" copies using a shared printer if he wanted to!
How to choose strong account passwords
Did you know that a computer that used eight Nvidia RTX 2080 Ti graphics cards has managed to crack an arbitrary 8-character password in only a few hours? GPUs have gotten much faster these days, and they are often used for nefarious purposes, rather than making the newest 3D games shine in their full splendor. I hear you: very few people will build a $10,000 computer to crack your passwords, but anyone can rent Amazon's Cloud Computing power for pennies and do the same job even faster!
Sadly, it looks like even much stronger passwords will be vulnerable in the near future as well. So, how can we make sure that our accounts stay safe? Let's find out!
As you already know, password length matters a lot. The machine that managed to break the 8-character password in about 2.5 hours would need 2.5 days to break a 9-character password, about 2 months to break a 10-character password, and so on. So, choose a password that's got at least 15 characters; a single extra char will boost its security exponentially.
Effective router security tips
Gone are the days when you had to configure your router's settings using primitive, DOS-like menus! These days, manufacturers make it really easy to tweak routers using easy to understand settings, and sometimes even cleverly designed mobile apps.
And yet, most small business owners purchase a router, set up a password for their Wi-Fi network, and then call it a day. It is true that most entrepreneurs are very busy, but if you take the time to set up your device properly, you will save a lot of time and headaches later on.
Evil people are lurking on the interwebz, trying to hack your router, and then get access to your company's data. Some of them may use a wardriving machine, a specially designed laptop that works in conjunction with a GPS, mapping out all the wireless networks in the area. Others may be thousands of miles away from your office, but use software that tries to make use of unpatched router vulnerabilities, and so on. So, let's see what can be done to protect your router.
IoT security guidelines
Internet of Things devices utilize various sensors, advanced hardware, intelligent software and network connectivity to solve all sorts of problems. Many of them automate data collection and processing, helping people take better decisions, and sometimes even taking smart decisions themselves! According to Gartner, there will be over 25 billion IoT devices in use by 2021.
Lots of people make use of IoT wearables to track various aspects of their lives, for example. And businesses utilize Internet of Things technologies to get new customers, reduce product and/or service development costs, increase productivity, boost the reliability of their operations, and so on.
However, a recent Data Alliance report highlights some of the key disadvantages that arise from using IoT devices. For starters, they can't exchange information with other devices properly, unless they have been built with this very purpose in mind. And even when they can communicate directly, device maintenance will quickly become very complex, as some Internet of Things technologies decline, and others reach their maturity. Add to this the lack of compliance, which is a very pressing, and yet almost impossible to solve issue, and you will start to understand some of the most important IoT challenges.
The ultimate malware removal guide
Everyone hates computer viruses! Excepting their creators, of course. And when disaster strikes, very few people know what to do in order to restore the computers to their clean state. Fortunately, we are here to help. So, read on and you will discover all the needed tools, as well as the required malware removal steps.
Begin by saving all your documents and files. Use a local storage device (an external hard drive, for example) and a free cloud-based storage service. This way, if something goes wrong and the disinfection process fails, you will be able to start anew. You should scan all the saved data before copying it back, of course; some of it may have gotten infected, but the viruses won't be able to stay active if you copy the data to an external drive, disinfect the computer, and then reconnect the external drive to the clean computer. The same thing happens if you work with the data that has been saved to a cloud storage service such as Google Drive, Amazon's Web Services, Microsoft's OneDrive, etc.
