Holiday Shopping: Best Practices for Shopping Safely Online

Have you ever considered that you could be a target for a hacker? The holidays are around the corner meaning that this is the season for scammers to get to work. Identity theft and scam prevention services reports that approximately 15 million Americans have their identities used fraudulently each year with financial losses totaling upwards of $50 billion.

Here are four tips to help keep you safe while you shop.

Never click on links in an email

Clicking on the link instead of manually typing in the retailer’s website can redirect you to a scam site. Fake emails are designed to look like retailer’s in hopes you’ll give them your personal information. In fact, email phishing scams remain the most widespread method of stealing information. Although I am only referring to one form, it is important for you to be aware of the many other forms phishing presents itself as.

Best practices:

  • Check for odd spelling and bad English grammar
  • Beware of links
  • Be leery on too good to be true deals
  • Avoid redirected sites
  • Keep your security software up to date

Use Wi-Fi connections that you know

What is so wrong about using public Wi-Fi? Although public Wi-Fi can be convenient when you are at your favorite coffee shop browsing your news feed, public Wi-Fi is not secure even if it is password protected making it a major security risk. You are still an easy target for a hacker to eavesdrop on your online conversations, transactions, and personal information. Essentially, all that is really needed is for you and the hacker to be on the same Wi-Fi.

Best practices:

  • Always verify the SSID (service set identifier otherwise known as Wi-Fi name) with the business hosting
  • Use a VPN (virtual private network) if in a dire situation

Shop on secure sites only

Your browser is the door to the internet and the front line of defense against security threats. Securing the front line will keep hackers from walking right through your front door. How do you let the deals come in while keeping the hackers out? Keep a close eye on your address bar making sure it always shows an icon of a locked padlock. This ensures that the site is using SSL (secure socket layer) encryption HTTPS:// (instead of just HTTP://) adding an extra layer of protection by encrypting your data.

Best practices:

  • Shop from familiar websites that you trust
  • Research unfamiliar sellers to make sure they are legitimate
  • Always update your browser

Avoid Fake phone apps

As you scroll through your phone’s app store you find an app that claims to help you find the best deals, it shows a good score, and has the most popular brands. Up to 75-80% of the top free apps on Android or iPhones have malicious software known as malware, giving hackers easy access to not only steal your personal information but a gateway to your everyday life. They can now snoop on your conversations, steal passwords, track your location, credit card information, and even use your phone’s camera to spy on you. Worse of all, these apps continue to work while they do their magic profiting from your device without you even knowing.

Best practices:

  • Do your research before downloading apps
  • Delete apps that do not make sense
  • Read the reviews
  • Review app permissions
  • Do not download apps from third party sources

Axiom Cyber Solutions Wins Runner-Up for Launching Las Vegas Award

Dr. Samir Pancholi and the Launching Las Vegas Committee are proud to announce the winner of the third annual Launching Las Vegas award, Wedspire. Launching Las Vegas was created in 2015 to celebrate those who work hard to build up Vegas and support our community. The annual contest has awarded $2,500 to local businesses since its inception.

Hundreds of votes were cast as community members came out in full force to recognize their favorite of three nominated startup companies: Wedspire, Axiom Cyber Solutions, and Fuelixer. All companies were chosen for their dedication and contributions to the Las Vegas entrepreneurial community—and they epitomize the hard work and passion Las Vegans are known for.

Axiom Cyber Solutions was awarded second place and a $250 cash prize. Axiom Cyber Solutions is a Las Vegas cyber security company focused on providing holistic, enterprise-class cyber security solutions to small-to-medium businesses. They’re dedicated to protecting businesses most at-risk of attack by providing a firewall backed by the SecureAmerica Threat Defense Platform, antivirus, and Endpoint Detection and Response for a low monthly subscription cost.

“We are honored to have been selected as one of the Launching Las Vegas finalists,” responds Troy Wilkinson, CEO of Axiom Cyber Solutions. “We would like to thank Dr. Pancholi for establishing the award and recognizing the startup businesses of Las Vegas. Thank you to all of our supporters for their votes.”

About Dr. Pancholi & Launching Las Vegas: Dr. Samir Pancholi is a Las Vegas-based cosmetic surgeon and owner and director of a thriving practice. As a local business owner himself, Dr. Pancholi understands the challenges and rewards of starting your own company—and he created the annual Launching Las Vegas award in 2015 to celebrate, honor, and support fellow entrepreneurs and the Las Vegas business community as it expands. Visit drpancholi.com or call 702.363.0240 to learn more about Launching Las Vegas. Dr. Pancholi is available for interview upon request.

What is Firewall-as-a-Service?

The firewall is one of the most important components of cybersecurity. The firewall sits at the edge of the internet connection filtering everything going into and out of the business.

One of the biggest gaps in any company’s cybersecurity strategy is constantly updating the firewall against the latest threat. Once a new threat or vulnerability is identified in the world, hackers have a new tool to break into your business. Your risk only increases until you patch your firewall against that threat. This is the cornerstone why Axiom was founded.

Not only do we provide proprietary Axiom technology that can process packets faster than other chipsets on the market, we fully configure the device for every business because no two businesses are the same. We then manage that device so that as new configurations become necessary, such as VPN tunnels or open ports, our experts can make those changes securely, so you don’t have to worry about accidentally leaving a backdoor open to hackers when changes are made.

The devices are monitored 24/7 by certified cybersecurity experts for indicators of compromise (IoC) as well as breach activity and attacks such as DDoS or ransomware. Our engineers monitor uptime and will reach out to the client if we see an outage, a major attack, or an advanced persistent threat.

Most importantly, our devices are updated more than 52,000 times per year. Because we fully manage the firewall, we can provide the most broad-spectrum updates in the industry. Behaviors, signatures, definitions, access control lists, heuristics, black lists, block lists, encryption algorithms and much more can be updated without the need to restart the device. Because of this advance in technology, we are able to reduce the amount of time from identification of a vulnerability to patching against it down to minutes rather than months.

Our updates originate from the SecureAmerica Threat Defense platform which is Axiom’s proprietary big data analytics engine that brings in multiple threat feeds from open and closed sources of vulnerability and hacker information. The platform then creates an update that is specific for our customers and pushes it out in real time. Our clients also become sources of threat intelligence. If their device sees a “Zero Day” attack, our firewall will send that to the platform and the update creation process begins. Within minutes of a client seeing a new threat, every Axiom customer is protected against it.

Axiom also provides real time feedback through our customer portal. This allows business owners and executives to get a real time look into what may be hitting their company. For IT administrators, there is a dashboard feature coming soon that will give full local visibility into logs, configurations, connections, and prevention statistics. Each month, the designated executive will receive summary reports so that you understand the tremendous value Axiom brings. When’s the last time your firewall emailed you to let you know it’s doing its job?

One of the benefits of Firewall as a Service is the need for less staff to manage it. Cybersecurity staff members can be costly and hard to find. Cybersecurity jobs are plentiful and employees to fill these roles are increasingly hard to find. Axiom can save businesses thousands of dollars in staff dollars alone. Another benefit is lower TCO or “total cost of ownership”. Because the hardware is included in the monthly subscription, there’s no large outlay of capital. Next generation firewalls can cost hundreds or thousands of dollars depending on throughput. With Axiom, you get the right device for your business at a low monthly subscription you can afford.

Another benefit is the unlimited change requests and support. Our engineers are here 24/7 to assist with whatever changes are needed and any tech support questions about our device or platform.

Call today to see if you qualify for a trial of the Axiom Firewall as a Service. Once you get your first monthly report of all the threats and attacks Axiom is able to prevent, we’re confident you’ll want to keep us in place.