M5 Systems LLC

This is a great question and the short answer is you don’t unless you have contracted with an IT professional who has all of the tools to scan your network for vulnerabilities and patched them. Also completing a security scan of your entire network making adjustments where necessary and following best practices to plug the holes in the problem areas. Making sure you are using 2FA or two factor authentication wherever possible, completing a Dark Web scan of all the email addresses used on the internet. Giving you recommendations for the property security products to fit your budget and making sure they are implemented properly with monitoring 24x7x365 to make sure that if there are any breaches they can be acted upon immediately. Just installing a security product and then walking away thinking you are now protected isn’t good enough anymore.

Yes it is true that software updates especially the operating system kind have a tendency to break things like printing, video drivers, etc. but it’s important to remember they also fix bugs and things like zero day exploits which can lead to bad actors getting into your systems. It’s always best to have these installed after the first Tuesday of every month. You can always consult an IT professional for advise about which patches might cause issues within your environment.

There are many ways to do this, some secure some not so secure. If you have a good enterprise level firewall product at your office the best way to do this is through an encrypted “VPN” or Virtual Private Tunnel. Keep in mind that authenticating from your machine at home requires more than just a username and password. You should also incorporate “2FA” or two-factor authentication which also requires providing a token with an app installed on your smartphone. There are also many products available where you can install an app on your office computer which runs “silently” in the back-round waiting for you to “call home” when you want to establish a remote session. Please make sure to incorporate 2FA here as well and not just rely on a username and password.

There are many places where this can happen, databases are compromised all the time and that data is harvested and sold on the “Dark Web”. The only way to know for sure is to get a “Dark Web” scan of all your email addresses used on the internet to see if you have been compromised. M5 Systems provides this for all of their clients and we monitor these activities 24x7x365

This is really a great question as we get asked all the time. For most people who use hosted mail services from the big companies often there is nothing in place for good Email Security like anti-spam, or email anti-virus. You are basically on your own to provide those services. Our customers subscribe to an Email Security Service which provides them a high level of security and anti-spam features for their email hosting. This reduces spam greatly and keeps their inbox much more secure from phishing attempts and malware.

There could be many causes for this, malware, disk fragmentation or disk errors, poor network connectivity, high CPU usage caused by a number of things, high memory usage caused by a number of things, anti-virus software constantly scanning causing high disk pressure