Sidmouth RFC Ladies

Ladies Rugby

On Sunday 12th December 2021 Sidmouth Rugby Club (a club which EDIT are a proud sponsor) are having a debut match for their newly found Ladies Team, the Sidmouth Valkyries.

Sidmouth RFC Women’s 1st XV v Exeter Saracens Women’s 1st XV. Come along and support this historic moment for Sidmouth RFC.

Kick-off is at 2:30pm

PSTN Switch Over

Phone

With 2021 drawing to a close and as we get ever closer to 2022 the time has come to think about your PSTN phone line. In 2025 BT are withdrawing the copper services that deliver phone calls to and from your home or business! Sooner than this you may notice when trying to order a phone service that it is slightly different too!

Do not panic, you will still be able to have a landline phone but the way it works will be changing slightly. Instead of using traditional copper cabling your phone will plug directly into your internet router and phone calls will work over your existing broadband connection.

Protecting Your Website From Spam

Do you struggle with receiving all sorts of spam from your website? If so, we have a solution for this.

We provide an Anti-spam service which will help to filter out what is legitimate and what is not.

In the last week our Anti-spam software detected 1185 entries into our customers website contact forms, of which 1174 were spam and only 11 were legitimate entries. This software is also used to detect genuine visitors to your website, you can see from the image on your right that 503 rogue visitors were blocked from the websites.

If our Anti-spam service is something you are interested in, please contact us to find out more.

 

The Importance of Multi-Factor Authentication

A password is no longer enough to secure your information or data or prevent access to your many online accounts. A ‘password’ implies a single word without spaces; a ‘passphrase’ is often longer and encourages the use of spaces in between words – a great way to improve complexity. There are other reasons as to why passphrases are better than passwords:

  1. 1. Passphrases can be easier to remember without compromising on entropy (how unpredictable/complex credentials are)
  2. 2. The use of upper and lower case characters along with punctuation will help to satisfy complexity requirements

In addition to this, we would always recommend a credential manager to store this information securely. They can also be used to generate a unique passphrase for each account.

Multi-factor authentication (MFA) is the process by which a person proves their identity to gain access to information or data using more than one authentication method. This can be achieved by combining different credentials from multiple categories which often includes;

  • • A passphrase
  • • A smartcard or token (via authentication app or SMS text message)
  • • Biometrics (fingerprint or retina – but this is used more in the enterprise environment)

Whilst multi-factor authentication has been a feature in certain industries such as banking (in the form of One-Time-Passwords or OTP) for a few years now, a large number of home users are yet to adopt this improved security method.

When a sample group were asked in a recent study why they did not use MFA 41% said inconvenience was the primary reason (source University of Maryland and Johns Hopkins University study).

With the addition to authentication apps for mobile devices, MFA is now easier and more efficient than ever before. To see which online services currently offer two-factor/multi-factor authentication check out this website twofactorauth.org.

The Latest Ransomware: Everything You Need To Know

Everything you need to know about the latest ransomware

Ransomware first hit the headlines back in 2013 with several variants since, each becoming more and more sophisticated. The bad news is that there is a new variant which has been recently released that is even worse than previous versions.

“Locky” – the nickname of the latest strain will not only rename your files so that they have the extension .locky but like all ransomware variants it will encrypt them first making them inaccessible to the end-user. It has been known to target images, videos and Office documents first before moving onto to other file types. It might also target data stored on other machines via network drives.

The main source of this threat seems to be via spam emails with seemingly safe attachments, often Word documents which contain malicious code. Once this malware has hit the desktop background will typically be altered to display a message with decryption instructions that state it is possible to make a payment to these criminals in order to obtain the decryption key that could be used to unscramble these files.

It is generally accepted that paying the ransom is not an option as you cannot guarantee that you will receive a decryption key or that it will indeed work. That leaves the option of restoring from a recent backup once the machine is free of this malware. Most antivirus products will detect the latest ransomware but we would recommend using an award-winning ESET product to ensure that your machine is fully cleaned.

In terms of prevention, ensuring that your antivirus software is up-to-date and that you have a robust backup procedure in place will help in the event that you are hit. Always be wary of spam emails containing hyperlinks and/or email attachments, particularly if they come from an unknown source.

To find out how we can protect your computer, Click here.

Call the Professionals

We understand that businesses often struggle to harness the power of technology to enhance their own business and recognise the need for a professional but friendly approach to solving this problem.

We feel that we can provide products & services at affordable prices that allow you to better focus on running your own business safe in the knowledge that we will be maximising your IT infrastructure for you.

  • 01392 908000
  • info@eastdevon.it

Portfolio

Sidmouth Hospice at Home

www.sidmouthhospiceathome.org.uk

Sidmouth Hospice at Home (formerly Sidmouth Hospiscare) was formed in 1984 and since this time have been providing high quality care and support to people suffering a debilitating and life limiting illness and their carers, family and friends.

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