Security Archives - Macnamara ICT

Best practices

Leave Passwords in the Past: Why the NCSC Is Backing Passkeys for Login Security

The UK’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) has delivered a clear new message: “Leave passwords in the past – passkeys are the future.” In April 2026, the NCSC formally updated its guidance to recommend using passkeys as the default way to log in wherever services support them, instead of traditional passwords (even those paired with multi-factor authentication). This is a major shift in cyber security advice, and overturns decades of password-centric best practices.

Macnamara Content Team 5 May 2026

Best practices

Making Sense of Information Security – Online Course

In this series of 5 short tutorials, ‘Making Sense Of Information Security’, Ciaran delivers a step by step guide on getting to grips with this at times tricky concept. Aimed at office managers, we cover areas such as how to get senior management buy-in, how to undertake a risk assessment, how to approach treatment of those risks, your responsibilities to data subjects under the GDPR, and more.

Ciaran Kenny 27 November 2024

Security

The 7 Most Common Attack Vectors in 2024

With the rapid onset of new technological capabilities, cyberattacks are a very real threat to any modern business. After all, as more businesses implement new technologies into their business, cyber attackers gain more new targets to try their hand at.

Macnamara Content Team 15 November 2024

Macnamara News

ISO 27001 From The People Who Implemented It

Achieving ISO27001, the gold standard of information security, is no mean feat. We’re incredibly proud of the achievement but we could have only done it with the help and engagement of everyone on the team.

Geoff Courts 22 October 2024

Macnamara blog

ISO 27001 – We Are Now Certified!

We are exceptionally pleased to announce that as of 14th October 2024 we are now fully and officially ISO27001 certified, a process we started a little over a year ago. We’ve always taken information security seriously, and have been certified with Cyber Essentials and other standards from IASME since 2015. But it’s always been an ambition to go for the internally recognised Gold Standard.

Geoff Courts 18 October 2024

Best practices

Is Your IT Support Cyber Essentials Certified?

Cyber Essentials is the minimum security baseline that all companies should aim to achieve. It checks to ensure that the very basics are covered, such as MFA on all Cloud service accounts, no admin rights for day-to-day use, and that security updates are installed promptly. If you are seeking to certify your own organisation, you should definitely ensure that your IT Support – who likely have far more access and control over your company data than you do – has at least this basic benchmark certification.

Geoff Courts 15 October 2024

Best practices

Data Loss Prevention Policies in M365

Data Loss Prevention (DLP) policies in Microsoft 365 (M365) are useful security measures designed to monitor or prevent legitimate, inadvertent or malicious sharing of sensitive information outside of an organisation. As companies have moved away from on-premises servers for file storage towards M365 SharePoint and OneDrive, more and more are using it to save all their company data. But many business are not using the full range of functionality and background security features that make M365 a truly powerful modern tool for work and collaboration.

Geoff Courts 13 September 2024

Macnamara blog

IT Support vs IT Security – Are You Getting The Service You Deserve?

Small businesses are just as vulnerable – if not more so – as larger organisations to cyberattacks, data breaches, and other IT-related issues (including simply poorly maintained equipment) that can compromise their operations, reputation, and profitability. They also need an occasional helping hand with some of the more everyday helpdesk issues that arise, be they problems, or simply helping to get new staff set up on the systems.

Macnamara Content Team 2 January 2024

Best practices

What is Information Management and Information Security?

Before the cloud, when businesses were primarily working from an office, they knew where their information was, how people could access it, how it was backed up and how it was protected. Now since we’re ever increasingly working in the cloud and from multiple remote locations, it’s less clear. This can cause all sorts of problems and headaches for businesses, including a heightened risk of becoming the victim of fraud through to non-compliance with your legal and regulatory obligations.

Macnamara Content Team 9 November 2023

Best practices

Why You Shouldn’t Mix Personal and Business Browsing

Using browser profiles is extremely useful. It allows you to sign in on multiple devices and get the same bookmarks, passwords, and history across your devices. BUT, you should never use the same profile for work that you use for your personal browsing, and for good reason.

Geoff Courts 8 November 2023

Best practices

Why Use Managed Email Signatures?

While email signatures are not (let’s face it) the most glamourous aspect of IT, they are however often overlooked and under-appreciated. Not only can they be great for branding, they can even be used as an important element of your company security. There are also some regulatory reasons to have a signature on company emails too. ‘How can my email signature contribute to my security’ you ask? Good question!

Geoff Courts 13 July 2023

Macnamara blog

Could You Have Been Breached And Not Even Know It?

If your account is breached, how would you know? A clever cybercriminal, on gaining access to an account, would not necessarily take immediate action. They may linger for some time, taking advantage of their access to explore what you have access to, examine your data, and read your email transactions, waiting for the moment to pounce. In this article by one of our security partners, we dispel some myths and examine some scary truths about how malicious actors take advantage of access.

Macnamara Content Team 16 June 2023

Best practices

Biometrics: Face The Future Of Digital Security

With 4 in 10 small businesses and a quarter of charities reporting cyber security breaches in the last 12 months * it’s more important to protect your personal and company data than ever before. With the increasing rise in cyber-attacks and data breaches, relying on a password alone can leave your computers, mobile devices, and online accounts in a vulnerable state. This is where passwordless sign-in can save the day.

Ash 5 June 2023

Cloud Services

What Does ChatGPT Know About Cyber Essentials?

A day doesn’t go by when AI, and ChatGPT in particular, are not in the news. The Large Language Model (LLM) has absorbed every word on the internet up to the year 2021 and as a result it’s able to answer all manner of questions as well as write content for you based on the simplest of queries. It even threatens the once dominant status of Google as THE go to source of information. Curious, I asked it why Cyber Essentials is good for small business. Here’s what it said.

Geoff Courts 31 May 2023

Best practices

Stay Safe Online: Why Public WiFi is a Risk You Can’t Ignore

Love using public WiFi? Beware! It can be dangerous. From hackers to identity theft, public WiFi can leave you vulnerable to all kinds of online threats. But do not worry, I have your back! In this blog, I will show you why public WiFi is so risky and give you some easy tips to stay safe. So, before you connect to that free WiFi hotspot, read on to find out how to protect yourself!

Hubert 3 May 2023

Hardware

What Does It Mean To Say “My Computer Is Supported By Macnamara”?

At Macnamara, we like to say that we support people, not machines. And, of course, that is true. We support people who use computers, and we help them to get past the problems that their computers throw up. Every now and again though, when no one is watching, we drop what we learned in Marketing 101 for Small Businesses, and admit that we love computers and we do in fact support computers as well as people (who we love even more).

Ciaran Kenny 14 March 2023

Best practices

CEO Fraud – How It Works

CEO fraud is up there, along with phishing and ransomware, in the top three cyber threats facing small businesses. CEO fraud comes in a variety of more or less sophisticated forms, but most commonly appears as a forged email or SMS message purporting to come from the CEO or other senior person and asking for money to be transferred to meet some urgent requirement.

Ciaran Kenny 4 November 2022

Best practices

LastPass Password Manager

Password management can be a bit of a nightmare. We’re always told to use complex passwords that are hard to guess, and to never re-use passwords. But, in practice this can be a challenge to remember them all! Most of us may have dozens if not hundreds of online services that require a username and password to access. How on Earth are we supposed to have a different complex password for them all and be expected to remember them without writing them down?

The good news is, you don’t have to remember them, or write them down!

Geoff Courts 20 January 2022

Macnamara blog

You have a new Fax!

When was the last time you received a fax? Possibly never. But, it might surprise some of you to know that millions of faxes get sent every day. In Germany, Japan and the US especially, they are alive and well, if not so much here in the UK. But how are they used in Phishing?

Geoff Courts 24 September 2021

Macnamara blog

Information Security

You can’t have IT without Security!

There, we said it, but what does that mean and perhaps more importantly, what does it mean for our customers?

Steve Hood 15 September 2021

Macnamara blog

Is The MSP (Managed Services Provider) Model Broken?

The evolution of the MSP started in the 1990s with the emergence of application service providers (ASPs) who helped pave the way for remote support for IT infrastructure. From the initial focus of remote monitoring and management of servers and networks, the scope of an MSP’s services expanded to include mobile device management, managed security, remote firewall administration and security-as-a-service, and managed print services.

Steve Hood 19 August 2021

The Macnamara Blog