The Macnamara Blog

DPD
Macnamara blog

Credit Card Fraud: Missed Delivery

Continuing our expose on Phishing, let’s take a look at this real example of a common scam where you’re asked to enter bank card details to re-schedule a missed delivery.

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Phishing
Best practices

Phishing – How Does It Work?

Everyone gets phishing emails. Unfortunately they’re everywhere. Most get filtered through to your junk folder or caught before they are even delivered, but some still get through. But what they are and how they work isn’t always clear. Here we’ll try to de-mystify an all too common and potentially dangerous nuisance.

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Sign Post sm
Cloud Services

What is a Domain?

Domains are everywhere and they’re a vital part of the internet, not to mention your online company identity. A key part of our service is Domain Management so, by and large, if you’re a client of ours you don’t need to worry too much about what it is or what it does. But having some background on what they are and how they work is always useful.

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Macnamara blog

What is the difference between HTTP and HTTPS?

You may have noticed when browsing online that some website addresses start with https:// whilst others start with http://. But have you ever wondered what that means in practice?

In short, the difference is quite simple: one is secure (https) and the other is not (http).

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Best practices

Why you need a secure password

A strong password is essential for preventing others from gaining unauthorised access to your account or device. The stronger the password the more difficult it will be for a hacker to crack.

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Best practices

How to make a secure password

It can be hard to think of a password that you can remember when you need it, let alone multiple passwords and variations. What can make this is easier is using a methodology or naming convention for your passwords.

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Cloud Services

Teams or Zoom?

Both applications do the job of video conferencing well, and they’re not the only ones (e.g. Google Meet, Starleaf, Webex). But what’s the real difference, and when should you use one over the other?

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Security

How to Spot a Fake Email, Part 2: The Anatomy of a Scam

In our previous post on how to spot a fake email, we covered some easy ways to identify the spams, scams and spoofs that inevitably land in your inbox.

But it’s not easy to write one post covering everything. And it’s not uncommon for us to receive a few reports a day from our clients of scamming. There’s a lot of it out there, much of it increasingly hard to identify.

That’s why we’re going to break it down further today and take you through the anatomy of a scam email.

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why you need multifactor authentication
Security

Why Use Multi-Factor Authentication?

As we move increasingly towards online services, securing your account is more important than ever.

While computer viruses still exist, they’re no longer the route of choice for hackers to get control of your data. Instead, the prevalence of online services means that the bad guys are targeting your cloud services, such as your email and file storage.

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how safe is your fishtank
Best practices

How Safe Is Your Fish Tank?

What on earth is this one about, I hear you ask? The Internet Of Things, that’s what; those millions of things that connect to the internet, like your home central heating, your toaster, webcams, children’s toys and yes, even fish tanks, allowing them to send you messages and alerts, or to be controlled and managed from your smartphone.

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Best practices

Better Web Privacy – Browsers, Trackers & Blockers

Surfing the web in private is a minefield.

Everywhere you go, something is watching you, tracking your search results and the pages you visit.

And more often than not the goal is to target you with advertising based on the things that you’re probably interested in (probable because hey, that’s what you’ve been looking at isn’t it?)

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sharing office password security
Security

Is it ever a good idea to share office passwords?

At first glance the answer is obvious. No, of course we should never share our passwords, why would we? 

I agree and yet, here’s an oddity: we often encounter small companies where password sharing is common. It may not be obvious at first but with a little digging the practice turns out to be the norm. 

In fact, anecdotally, I would say offices in which some degree of password sharing goes on are more common than those that absolutely ban it.

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Cyber Essentials 2023
Best practices

Cyber Essentials: Is It Worth It?

For some companies, Cyber Essentials or Cyber Essentials Plus certification is a must-have. Usually this is because their position in the supply chain — e.g.

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