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Extech Cloud’s ongoing
EXTECH CLOUD’S ONGOING INVESTMENT IN TRAINING AND STAFF DEVELOPMENT PROVES A SUCCESS
Extech Cloud, an award-winning IT managed service provider based in Sussex, was recently thrilled to be announced as ‘Edge Partner of the Year’ in the Vuzion Cloud Awards 2021.
Vuzion is an innovative Cloud solutions specialist, assisting businesses like Extech Cloud, ensuring the best possible foundation for their partners to build and develop a sustainable and future-proof business for the 21st Century.
The team at Extech Cloud has partnered with Vuzion’s EDGE Partner Program in order to ensure the team has the technical skills and expertise to offer customers the solutions and services to suit their needs.
INVESTING IN KNOWLEDGE AND STAFF DEVELOPMENT
“Part of our ongoing work with Vuzion involves heavily investing in the training of our team, with the help of Vuzion Cloud,” says Andrew Hookway, Director of Extech Cloud. “This is so that our team of experts at Extech Cloud can continue to provide top-level service and pass this knowledge on to our wide range of clients. We want to ensure that no matter what a client might want to speak to us about, we have the best possible answers and solutions on-hand to help”.
CONTINUALLY LEARNING AS NEW INNOVATIONS ARISE
As the world of IT is so fast-moving, the team at Extech Cloud aim to continually learn as new innovations arise, ensuring that they are always ahead of the curve and that clients are empowered with the know-how to be in the starting gates when the business boom hits, and by all accounts later this year. If your business has a new-found confi dence in future business conditions following the fi rst steps in the gradual easing of the national lockdown, you may find that uncertainties are now shifting towards what you are doing with your IT.
LOCKED DOWN IT DUE TO A RELUCTANCE TO CHANGE?
Over the years, the team has seen time and time again where a business’ IT systems become ‘locked down’ due to the reluctance to change current practices.
Having the right systems in place ensures that day-to-day routines can continue without any spanners being thrown into the works. It’s a way to future-proof the business and ensure that you’re competing within your sector, otherwise what’s the point?
For example, you wouldn’t enter a marathon without your running shoes, would you? Therefore why be in the race when you’re at less than your best?
BE AT YOUR BEST WITH EXTECH CLOUD
Digital transformation is easier than you think when you come to Extech Cloud. Speak to the experts to get the facts. Contact the team on +44 (0) 1444 443200, email info@extech.co.uk or visit www.extechcloud.com
BHAVNA MISHRA
Bhavna Mishra is the founder of Browzly, an innovation EdTech created to help every child experience the joy of reading and teachers to support and track each student’s reading and learning progress. Proven to improve student engagement, Browzly connects school communities in a social reading network to share books, reviews and take multimedia book and topic quizzes. As a one person team, Bhavna has built up the business on her own, from establishing relationships with schools to testing the service at every stage of development.
In 2016, she found herself working endless hours at a corporate job. Due to the amount of work and stress that she was enduring she found that she was becoming burnt out within her current role. When speaking with a mentor and discussing her strengths and what she wanted, she concluded that she no longer wanted to feel this way and sought to do something about it.
❛❛ Bhavna’s ultimate moon-shot for Browzly is to be endorsed by the Department of Education ❜❜
After making the decision to leave the corporate world, Bhavna received job offers from a few different companies but she knew that this was something that she didn’t want to jump back into. At the time she had two young children that were both in Primary school and realised that neither of them had enough books that they could read to develop their learning. As a result, she came up with the idea of creating Browzly. Initially, it was created as a paperback swap platform that would allow students to connect with each other and swap their copies of books.
After taking time to research and speak with multiple schools, Bhavna discovered that a digital platform allowing students to swap and share their recently read books was something that students, parents and teachers at the school would fi nd very useful. Therefore, she then set out to create a concept presentation that would outline the idea that she had created. From here she received feedback on what would work best and asked if the school would like to pilot the platform with their teachers and students.
So far, since launching in 2017, Browzly have recently completed their fourth successful reading challenge with students participating from schools across the globe. At the beginning of 2020, Browzly won the popular Kids Judge Bett 2020 Award and was shortlisted for the fi nal in the Classroom aids for learning, teaching and assessment category! Bhavna has recently had approval to hire 10 employees as part of the Kickstart grant by the UK government; she will now be working to get more staff on board and continue making this a great platform for all to use.
Her ultimate moon-shot for Browzly is to be endorsed by the Department for Education as a recommended reading platform. As well as this, their vision is to continue making reading as accessible and enjoyable as possible for students of all learning abilities across the globe.
Contact Information https://browzly.com/ Linked In: http://linkedin.com/in/ bhavna-jmishra-07a25963
FBI IC3 report: cybercrime cases up 69%. By Scott Nursten, CEO, ITHQ
WELCOME TO THE WORLD’S FASTEST GROWING INDUSTRY
The FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Centre (IC3) reported 791,790 cybercrime cases in 2020 with direct losses of almost $4.2 billion. Many more cases are unreported or unknown - the Solarwinds breach compromised the entire supply chain and went undetected for months.
The IC3 report aims to use data to catch cyber criminals and recover stolen funds. To some degree, it is working. But cybercrime is slippery; criminals hide behind foreign IP addresses and cloaking technologies.
It’s also incredibly lucrative. With 69% growth, cybercrime is the fastest growing industry on the planet. Is your business prepared for the war that is coming?
CYBER DEFENCE SPEND VS CYBERCRIME PROFITS
Global cybersecurity spend was $153 billion in 2020 (Juniper research). Sound impressive? Cyber criminals took $2 trillion from their victims over the same period.
IBM puts the average cost of a corporate breach at $3.86 million, yet businesses are not even investing 10% of this amount in cyber defences on average.
The biggest single reported payout in the year was a wire fraud business email compromise costing $60 million. Another case cost $2 million and yet another cost $977,000. These three cases, each costing a million dollars plus, show the scale of loss is growing dramatically. The $4.2 billion losses do not include consequential costs such as lost time, lost earnings etc. This is the amount paid directly to criminals from American companies and individuals desperate to fi x a problem they could have prevented for a fraction of that.
GLOBAL SIGNIFICANCE
The IC3 report is the only one of its kind to categorise cybercrime, attack methods, direct losses and criminal patterns. It shows how crimes are escalating across the world, many with international links.
Excluding the US, the UK leads the top 20 international victim countries by a wide margin. 216,633 known attacks were UK-based. In second place, Canada is 40 times less likely to fall victim to an attack with 5,000 cases.
HOW 5% OF VICTIMS PAID 50% OF THE LOSSES
Of all reported cases, 95% (33 types of crime) mainly effect consumers and count for just over half of the losses. The remaining 5% (4 types of crime), those reported mainly by businesses, account for the other half. This means the average business paid more than $100,000 compared with the average consumer paying $5,000.
TOP 4 LOSSES TO BUSINESSES
1Business Email Compromise (BEC) 19,369 cases $1,866,642,107 lost While phishing can lead to BEC, it’s more likely that executive email accounts are hacked or spoofed, leading to identity theft and funds being diverted or converted to cryptocurrency.
2Tech support fraud 15,421 cases $146,477,709 lost Criminals usually targeting older people at home used the same tactics to gain access to corporate networks. Playing into doubts and insecurities, they pressure people into making a decision, say they’ll get in trouble if they don’t act fast. It’s powerful stuff if you’re new to remote working and get a call from ‘tech support’ saying they need your login to fi x an urgent issue. 3 Phishing 241,243 cases $54,241,075 lost Phishing aims to get onto the network, rather than directly accessing cash. Once access is gained, the real attack is carried out. IC3 received 241,243 phishing-related complaints last year, making the $54 million price tag relatively small compared with BEC for example, but phishing is often simply how they pick your lock. This means losses are often attributed to other crimes further down the line.
4Ransomware 2,474 cases $29,157,405 IC3 have added a special note to the ransomware loss rate, indicating a much higher average cost than the $12,000 indicated here. They state that adjusted losses do not include lost business, time, wages, equipment, or remediation services. Cases or losses are often unreported or made directly to the FBI, creating an artifi cially low loss rate here.
We work with a business that lost millions of pounds following a ransomware attack earlier this year. In my opinion, these losses are definitely under-accounted.
❛❛ Global cybersecurity spend was $153 billion in 2020 .Cyber criminals took $2 trillion from their victims over the same period ❜❜
WHAT DOES FUTURE CYBER RESILIENCE LOOK LIKE?
The IC3 report is incredibly useful, but it only looks backwards. Training your staff in cyber awareness is a great start but we have to prepare for advanced, layered and persistent attacks. Criminals access your network first, fi nd out everything they can about you, stealing valuable data, maybe trying email scams. Once they’ve exhausted every avenue, they’ll encrypt everything and ransom you. After you think “phew, it’s over”, they may still sell your exfi ltrated data as well.
Layered attacks are already happening. Only the criminals know what they have planned for tomorrow, which is why strategy is so important. Because BEC is top of the danger list, it may be tempting to race out and buy email security software. But that alone is not enough, because once email security is fixed, attackers will use something else. Then what?
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SECURING IOT WHEREVER YOU WORK
