Kevin McDonald guest writes a blog for Dave Berkus’ Berkonomics
TUESDAY, June 21st, 2016
By Kevin McDonald
Phishing, a play on the word “fishing,” is a dangerous form of executive or CEO email fraud, and is negatively impacting individuals and companies worldwide. You certainly have seen some form of this social engineering – where criminals pretend to be an organization or individual such as the IRS, a creditor, partner, CEO/CFO or other key executive.
The goal is to “phish” a person into taking actions they shouldn’t. An attack may involve a call demanding payment to the phisher for past due invoices from a legitimate supplier, or verification of credit card data to create facilitate the fraudulent transaction. Phishing can hook you through infected emails – or links to a fake website containing malware – or information capturing forms you are asked to complete.
Many websites are compromised and have been hacked with or set up with embedded nefarious software. A successful attack can lead to you or one of your associates providing highly sensitive personal details of self, customers or employees – including social security numbers, usernames, passwords, and/or banking information. Phishing victims have been known to transfer large sums of money as a result of appeals, threats, or claims.
Some attacks are rudimentary, but… To read the rest of this story, please click here to go to BERKONOMICS.COM
Smoke testing is a term used to describe the testing process for servers after patches are applied. 
Estimating an average time for patching servers and PCs can be a bit tricky. It can vary from one month to the next, depending upon the number and complexity of the patches released by your software vendors. You must consider all versions of operating systems and have a complete inventory of all your application software to do this job correctly. Our experience has shown that manual patching of systems takes on average of about 1.5 hours each.
This is a basic cost calculator for you to compute your typical monthly cost for patching your servers, PCs, laptops, tablets and associated application software. It also forms the basis for you to begin calculating your Return on Investment for software patching, or for comparison with alternatives to the manual process of patching operating systems and application software—such as Patch Management as a Service, also known as Vulnerability Management as a Service.