Microsoft believes hackers have been targeting Skype accounts since early August. When Microsoft integrated Skype logins with general Microsoft account logins, your old Skype username and password might be an unintentional and weak back door straight into your main Microsoft account.

The Verge has a detailed article on the attacks, and also simple-to-follow instructions to ensure your account is secure, which we have replicated below. Click HERE to read the complete article. 

1. Go to https://account.microsoft.com, if you're already signed in, sign out.
2. Enter your Skype name, not your Microsoft Account email address, and use your Skype password to sign-in
3. If you've linked your Microsoft Account previously, you'll be prompted to sign-in and merge the accounts to create a Skype alias

Once the two accounts are properly merged, Microsoft creates a Skype alias to let you keep signing in with a Skype username. You can continue using this or disable it under the aliases preferences, to ensure nobody can try to sign in with your Skype username. Either way, you won't be able to use your old Skype password anymore, and attackers will have to know the email address associated with your account.

Your alias preferences can be found HERE.

Great communication starts with the right tools. Unified Communication as a Service (UcaaS) is not a new concept nor is it a niche market, but a mainstream one already worth $4 billion in the USA alone. The cloud has become the preferred way of staying ahead of rapidly changing needs and increasingly sophisticated demands of customers. Businesses are finding that sticking with their legacy communication tools are becoming increasingly risky, with higher cost and liabilities.

So why invest an average of $878 per user in on-premise hardware if you don’t really need it? Don’t, here's why:

1. Your business-grade Internet connection is now plenty fast and reliable to trust it with your phone calls, and you can always have calls forward to mobile phones if needed.
2. You’re probably already using Internet-based voice: Do you Skype, WebEx, Wifi-call, FaceTime, Discord, Mumble, or TeamSpeak?
3. It's scalable: 2 users or 500, UCaaS scales to fit you without any big cash forklifts.
4. You can have a handset on your desk if you prefer, or you can go fully digital using only your computer and/or mobile apps.
5. If you have multiple offices, all your calls between them are still part of the same virtual phone system, and thus are free (no long distance charges!)

What's the best solution to fit your business? Our R&D team has invested countless hours and resources on this very topic, and we have landed on 8x8. 8x8 is the leader in cloud communication, providing scalable solutions for SMB's to help consolidate and unify a wide array of communication and collaboration services onto a single platform.

Here are some of the other key reasons Five Niners chose 8x8:

• 8x8’s SLA guarantees 99.99% service availability.
• Calls are secure. 8x8 is HIPAA compliant and will sign a BAA, and has met several other major security standards.
• Scalability for businesses from 1  - 1000

Why should your phone system features only improve every 5 or 7 years, when you spend tens or hundreds of thousands on a new phone system? It’s all software; with 8x8 you’re getting free feature enhancements regularly.

Ready to make the switch? If Five Nines is your Managed IT Services provider ask your account manager! If not, learn more about 8x8, here!

Still debating if you should upgrade to a cloud based option? Download the infographic below to learn more!

You may remember hearing the buzz about Nelnet acquiring Allo in 2015. Prior to the acquisition Allo was and still is providing fiber optic network options to Western Nebraska. After the acquisition Allo became the first company to provide fiber optic cables from the street directly to homes and businesses across the city of Lincoln.

What does this mean for your business?

1. 100 Mbit and Gigabit Internet are quite fast. Your business-grade firewall will likely need to be upgraded to a higher model to provide protection at those speeds. If you are a Five Nines client you  can contact your engineer or account manager to find out more.
2. Allo does not require a contract. If you plan to explore Allo's services once they are in your area, you may want to create a plan before signing a multi-year agreement with another provider.
3. Yes, it is fiber all the way into your building, not just to the curb or to a box a mile away and then copper from there.
4. Because it’s fiber to your building, Allo also offers affordable private WAN for your multi-branch business, to other businesses that you need to exchange large amounts of data with, and even your datacenter colocation rack.
5. Have employees who work from home? How about private WAN into your business network for them as well!
6. Some Allo pricing is listed as the after-tax total, so make sure to always compare apples to apples.
7. Installing fiber optic cable takes time, the photo above shows the current service plan for Lincoln. For more information on the complete schedule visit, www.allo.com or if you are a Five Nines client ask your IT Account Manager.

What's the big deal? Why fiber over copper?

The fiber optic signal is made of light which entails very little signal loss meaning data moves at a higher speed over a greater distance. Fiber keeps your data safer because it is incredibly difficult to tap into in comparison to copper cable. Another key point especially in the state of Nebraska, weather doesn’t affect fiber because the core is glass making it immune to most interference.

"Help_Decrypt_Your_Files," the year of ransomware has officially arrived. These 4 words can turn a business upside down with one click of the mouse. Your calendar, your kid's baseball schedule, payroll information for hundreds of nurses - to nothing, everything is encrypted. The emotional moments following are filled with panic and distress; someone or something has locked all of your files. A popup will then notify you of a specific amount of time you have to pay via untraceable bitcoins in order to retrieve your files, or lose them forever.

This has become the reality for many businesses across the country. With 90,000 machines being infected on a daily basis, it’s a dire situation. For Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center in Los Angeles, it was more than a harsh reality. After being attacked with ransomware, the hospital was forced to shuffle its patients to nearby facilities for weeks as they paid their attackers to regain file control.

Traditional antivirus solutions require manual intervention by a human to review new potential virus or malware threats. Only after a threat has been captured and analyzed is it is added to the database of known threats. While this was a successful method for a long time, hackers have since found ways to disguise and mutate viruses to pass detection. So, while the traditional method of virus detection helps to contain known “old” viruses, it does very little in preventing new ones from invading.

What do you need to know to protect your data?

Enter Cylance, a next generation antivirus software company who predicted the upswing in hacker potential and created a program that combats against today's attackers. Cylance uses a mathematical algorithm to evaluate hundreds of thousands of traits that allow it to accurately classify “bad” files from the “good” files. Thus, Cylance is blocking viruses and malware in real time, regardless of how new or old the malware is, which is why Cylance has been found to be 100% effective at blocking all variants of Locky ransomware.

Thinking about taking your ninja-fighting antivirus software to the next level? Here are the top five things you need to know about Cylance:

1. Is smarter than any human; built by machine-learning.
2. Blocks malicious programs before they’re allowed to run, not afterwards.
3. Does not rely on signature updates that are always stale by definition. 
4. Is stopping “ransomware” like CryptoLocker and Locky in their tracks.
5. Protects against “zero-day” malware, even when not connected to the Internet.

Education is key: download the infographic to learn more about the five stages of crypto-ransomware and ways you should already be protecting yourself.