Do you know what kind of impact social media is having on your workplace and employee productivity? With the rise in popularity of social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter or even Pinterest, it is becoming more and more common for workers to spend time during the workday on these platforms. Did you know that some employees spend up-to 32% of their time on social media daily, while at work!? Although it can be essential for your business to partake in the conversation online, there is no reason all of your employees should be accessing their social media accounts while on the clock.

The Most Popular Social Media Sites

When it comes to social media sites, they seem to be constantly multiplying. Continue reading→

The internet is a sanctuary of free knowledge and learning, as well as a den of villainy and deceit. It is both a force for good and for evil. Regardless of the dangers of the internet, it has become a tool for the day to day lives of adults. But due to its dangers – and for the schools to get needed funding – children in school are often deprived of the internet’s good content by schools blocking nearly all webcontent. Youtube, Facebook and other repositories are completely blocked. Some schools even resort to over-blocking in order to protect themselves from hackers, but this simply doesn’t work.

The fact is “over-blocking” and “filtering” are tactics that students can sometimes subvert. A recent study shows that 35% of students know how to bypass internet filters. These students are digital natives and know how to counteract overblocking with proxies and mirrors. Continue reading→

Three Part Blog

Part I: The Internet and Employee Productivity

Competitive enterprises exist to prosper and therefore must operate with efficiency. Corporate stakeholders are tasked to keep labor and material costs low, justify investment in capital and variable expenses and protect the enterprise from contingent and potentially crippling liabilities derived, for the most part, out of negligence (lawsuits, product recalls, negative publicity, physical and IT infrastructure damage and disrepair). We continue to hear that productivity gains are paramount to controlling inflation and keeping manufactured goods competitive in world markets. In order to control costs and maintain your company’s competitive advantage, it is incumbent upon Management to identify and rid the corporation of malingerers and identify those that are less productive. Functional units need to keep their house in order to reduce the probability of extraneous costs. Operational efficiency takes on new meaning in times of economic contraction. Add the constant spate of corporate governance and consumer privacy legislation and you have a recipe that only disturbs the delicate balance managers must deal with as they attempt to meet requirements without destroying employee morale. In considering employee Internet access, clear thought needs to be given to productivity, liability and security. Continue reading→

With a growing number of attacks being seen by our computers, the risk of cyber attack is bigger and more common than it ever has been in history’s past. You may be asking yourself what we can do to protect your own computer and data from ransomware and viruses. In the following article, we compiled a few ways that you can use to keep your computer safe from hackers and cyber attacks. Let’s take a look.

How Ransomware Can Destroy Your Computer

To begin, we should discuss what ransomware is exactly. Ransomware is able to gain access to a computer the same way any virus or computer worm could, either through an infected email or a compromised website. Once inside the computer, a user is then bombarded with pop-ups and warnings that lock them out of their own computer or remove important files from the host computer. This is then where the word Ransom comes into play as users are ordered to pay a ransom to the cybercriminal in order to gain access to their files. Continue reading→

It is strongly recommended that an Internet Acceptable Use Policy be developed and communicated to all employees when an organization begins using an Internet monitoring or web filtering product.

The New Jersey Supreme Court issued an opinion in Stengart v. Loving Care Agency, Inc. considering whether an employee had a reasonable expectation of privacy in emails she exchanged with her attorney via her web-based personal email account using a company laptop. In concluding that the former employee did have an expectation of privacy, the Court analyzed the adequacy of the notice provided by the company’s electronic communications policy and the important public policy concerns raised by the attorney-client privilege. Continue reading→

At the outset, the #Obamacare website was not only riddled with errors, but it also came with a huge price tag: $600 million.  Most of us in IT cringe due to the fact that we have had our own hopefully-less-public IT disasters.  Projects evolve.  New software, hardware, devices and network designs are introduced to users that have typically been tested, revised, regression tested until ready for release.  The more complex, the further new releases will be from perfection.

When Healthcare.gov went live the cacophony from the public combined with the bright lights of the media would make any IT development team want to curl up in the fetal position – and with good reason.  With $600 million, one can only scratch their head and ask why the development wasn’t outsourced to a US company with a track record of competence.  Why not IBM, HP or NYXT, the chief architects behind the single fault tolerant systems designed for the NYSE?  Why not hire the beleaguered NASA; they’re pretty incredible at getting the impossible done.  Why not tap the expertise of Google and Facebook; they live and breathe immense-scale data handling and user access. The Obama administration didn’t just throw up a faulty website, they emboldened so many that believe the government is incapable of doing big things.  And in doing so, they allowed their detractors to easily conflate a faulty website with a public healthcare policy. Continue reading→

The year-end saw an unprecedented number of emails from retailers and businesses looking for you to visit them and make a purchase.  Unfortunately, this time of year also brings a large increase in spam and hack attempts that arrive in your inbox alongside the overflow of retailer emails. These emails are also known as “Phishing” emails.

Whether you’re on a corporate network or personal network you will be putting yourself at risk by opening these fraudulent emails. Phishing emails are getting harder and harder to differentiate from legitimate emails and when opened on a network can cause major havoc and security issues for your business data. So how do you know whether an email is legitimate or a “Phishing” email?

The tips below will help you identify and avoid falling prey to a phishing email: Continue reading→

Extensive Pearl Echo Block and Allow lists are typically not necessary when using Echo.Filters, our URL categorization database.  Despite the size of your control lists, it’s advisable to properly format and maintain control lists to ensure peak efficiency at your managed endpoints.

The following brief video discusses managing your lists including proper use of wild cards: Managing Control Lists

Ref: All Tutorials

Three Part Blog

Part 3: Security and Employee use of the Internet

Internet Security has become an umbrella term covering everything from identity theft to virus protection to using firewalls to keep outsiders out (except when you want them in). This article focuses on intentional as well as the inadvertent insider threat and address security concerns managers must understand when employees use company resources to access the Internet.

One of Pearl Software’s quickest success stories was a customer who kept losing competitive bids for contracts based on price. Fearing an inside leak, the customer installed our Employee Internet Management software and quickly discovered that one of his employees was being compensated for emailing confidential bid details to a major competitor. Another of our customers, a large hospital, was inundated with viruses – the digital sort. Computer viruses were frequently plaguing its systems, rendering them useless at times. Antivirus and antispyware software tools would successfully clean up defiled systems, but only after they wreaked havoc for users and the IT staff. The hospital installed Internet monitoring software in order to identify usage patterns and determine and block likely Web sites and users that were the root cause of their issues. The hospital’s primary concern was that an employee could inadvertently download a trojan, making an infected computer a gateway to external hackers and providing unauthorized access to patient information. Continue reading→

Exton, PA (PRWEB) May 21, 2014

Pearl Software announced the release of Echo.Cloud.Filter™, its cloud-based Web filtering solution. The Echo.Cloud.Filter provides organizations with over 60 content categories to block including custom Web white and black lists. Because its Web filtering occurs in the cloud, the solution is operating system and device independent. Filtering rules can be implemented without installing software on endpoints or adding additional hardware on-premises. Administrators can be confident that access to Web content is in line with policy, even if users are guests on the network or bring their own devices (BYOD) to use on an organization’s Wi-Fi hotspot.

“IT staff has the incredible challenge of securing their network while trying to accommodate users’ as they detach from their desktop with their personal devices like smart phones and tablets,” said Pearl Software CTO, Joe Field. “With Echo.Cloud.Filter, users of an organization’s Internet are easily pointed to our filtered DNS servers where custom access rules are applied. Administrators log into the Echo.Cloud.Filter portal to view usage details as well as set policy.”

Echo.Cloud.Filter provides organizational-level reporting and filtering policies. The product is configured in minutes as there is nothing to install and nothing to maintain. The Echo.Cloud.Filter DNS servers are redundant and multi-tiered, capable of filtering every URL request and either honoring them or redirecting them to a default or custom warning page. The Web filtering rules are based on Pearl’s Echo.Fitlers™ URL filter database, a component of Pearl Software’s leading suite of Internet monitoring and control products. For organizations needing additional monitoring and control features, Pearl Software provides Website.Echo as well as its flagship product, Pearl Echo.Suite.