Author Archives: thrivewpengine

Is Microsoft Excel 2013 running slow on your machine? Tired of the lag when switching cells? You’re not alone. Many people that have recently upgraded from Office 2010 to Office 2013 have noticed that the application performance when using Excel is subpar. Don’t worry. There’s a solution that should improve your experience.

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Two of the most popular buzzwords of recent years are ‘Big Data’. It hardly seems possible to read an IT article these days without it referring to this mystical entity. But what exactly is Big Data, why has it suddenly appeared, and why is everyone talking about it so much?

The thing to note first with regard to this subject is that there is no definitive definition of Big Data, as it is ultimately an abstract concept. The best way to define Big Data is to say that it essentially recognizes a process which has particularly accelerated in recent years; that of the rabid growth in the availability of both structured and unstructured data.

Although Big Data has been absorbed by the public collective consciousness in recent years, the concept has been understood among IT experts for over a decade. But because Big Data is an exponential concept, its relevance has grown massively of late. Many factors have contributed to its growth, not least that more and more institutions, organizations and businesses are increasingly interested in collecting information en masse whenever they have the opportunity to do so.

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The cloud is becoming part of peoples’ everyday lives, and more and more businesses are moving to use it, realizing its importance and recognizing the extent to which it will become an important part of commerce moving forward. But the cloud remains a misunderstood technological innovation, and one which has created numerous myths which are completely misguided. Here are some of the most popular: (more…)

Website plagiarism is a problem that is overlooked by most businesses. When you put your content on your website, you trust that someone won’t copy it and pass it off as their own. That would be too easy. Who would steal your content? Speaking from experience, the answer may surprise you. In 2011, Thrive Networks discovered that a Managed Services Provider in Australia had not only plagiarized our entire website, but they also were republishing our monthly Tech Brief newsletter as their own. After getting our legal department involved, the competitor was forced to take the content down from their site.

Recently, Thrive discovered more than a dozen new instances of website plagiarizing involving one or more pages from our site. If it can happen to Thrive, it can happen to any small business. Here’s what you need to know and how you can protect yourself.

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In the every changing world of online threats, a new type of spear phishing attack has emerged.

Have you ever gotten an email in your office asking you to receive money on behalf of someone in distress? These emails are easy to spot as pure SPAM and/or Phishing attempts. Even if you didn’t recognize this as SPAM, you would remember what your mother told you as a kid: “If it seems too good to be true, then it probably is.” Take a look:

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Microsoft has released an out-of-band security update to address the latest Internet Explorer “Zero-Day” vulnerability, as of 1PM on Thursday, May 1st, 2014. The patch has been fully tested and is ready to be released for all affected browsers. Despite previous reports, Microsoft will be releasing the security update for Microsoft XP users.

How do I download the patch for the “Zero Day” Vulnerability?

• If you have “Automatic Updates” enabled, you will not need to take any actions. The security update will be downloaded and applied automatically.
• If you do not have “Automatic Updates” enabled, you can manually update your machine by visiting Microsoft’s Security Update page and selecting your operating system.

As a reminder to all Thrive Managed Patching, ThriveCloud, and ThriveProtect customers, this patch will automatically be applied to your machine once we have tested it and approved it for release. You should continue to use other web-browsers until notified that you have been patched.

If you are a Thrive Managed Firewall customer, you have been protected from this vulnerability as long as you are behind your company’s corporate firewall.

For more information about Thrive’s Managed Patching and Managed Firewall Services, please visit our website.

This is a follow up to Thrive previous blog: “What you need to know about the Microsoft Internet Explorer “Zero-Day” Vulnerability“

The latest Internet Explorer “Zero-Day” vulnerability, first acknowledged by Microsoft on Saturday, April 26th, has left all version of Internet Explorer 6 through 11 vulnerable to exploitation. However, initial reports indicate that IE versions 9, 10, and 11 are the primary targets. According to the research firm FireEye, the exploit uses an Adobe Flash SWF file to execute the exploit. Machines that do not have Flash installed are believed to be safe. It is important to note that Microsoft will not be producing a patch for its Microsoft XP operating system. Support for this OS ended on April 8, 2014 so if you’re running this operating system on your machine, you will need to upgrade.

If you currently have a Thrive Managed Firewall powered by Dell SonicWALL, the Intrusion Prevention signatures to cover the “Zero-Day” exploit were added to your device within the last 48 hours. You are protected from this vulnerability when on the Internet behind your corporate firewall. (more…)

WAN acceleration can provide immediate benefits and return on investment which is clearly noticeable across your business. There are numerous benefits to be realized when you control the traffic to remote locations.

WAN Accelerators are a technology which provides a broad range of protocols and applications which are used to optimize a Wide Area Network (WAN). The technologies can include but are not limited to optimization of certain protocols, low level and bit level compression, and a variety of techniques which are used to improve the user experience over a WAN.

If you are uncertain about Wide Area Network (WAN) Acceleration and what it can do for your business, let’s take a look at what WAN Accelerators are, how they work, and the different ways that WAN Accelerators can benefit your business and improve ROI.
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By now you may have heard about the “Heartbleed Bug”, a serious security vulnerability in the OpenSSL cryptographic library. The OpenSSL library is used by a number of different computing platforms to secure communication between a client (typically in a web browser session) and a secure endpoint, typically a website or device used to allow access to secure business systems. Anytime you are conducting a transaction online you are typically using SSL, and you can tell that you are doing so when the URL starts with “https://” or when you see a padlock appear in the browsing session. It is estimated that this vulnerability effects upwards of 50% of Internet websites that use SSL, so the scope of the bug is potentially huge.

Because the vulnerability exposes extremely sensitive information to an entity who tries to exploit it, such as usernames, passwords, banking information, credit card information, and more, the threat is a very real and very serious one. You should take all reasonable precautions to secure your environment if you have systems that contain the vulnerability, as well as being aware of any communications from online vendors, such as banks, that may reach out to you indicating that they may have been subject to the vulnerability and that data may have been compromised.

For more technical information about the vulnerability you can start by looking here.

Thrive suggests that you do the following in response to the Heartbleed vulnerability:

1. Analyze and secure your business systems that have the vulnerability present by shutting down and / or patching effected systems.
2. Reach out to your third party vendors or providers about systems that utilize the Open SSL cryptographic library to ensure that the vulnerability is not present in those systems.

If you have any questions or would like Thrive to conduct a security audit of IT systems that are not managed by Thrive directly, please contact Thrive Networks today.

Did you just open a document in Microsoft Word 2013 and nothing is happening? Oh, that’s right….. You forgot to click on that annoying, little, yellow button on the top of the window. Welcome to the world of Protected View in Microsoft Office 2013.

As annoying as it may be, there are valid reasons for this security feature in Office 2013, which first appeared in Office 2010. As explained by the Microsoft Office Engineering Team…

“Files from the Internet and from other potentially unsafe locations can contain viruses, worms, or other kinds of malware that can harm your computer. To help protect your computer, files from these potentially unsafe locations are opened in Protected View. By using Protected View, you can read a file and see its contents while reducing the risks..”

It goes without saying that you shouldn’t open a document from a sender that you don’t know. If you’re ready to turn off this annoying alert permanently, here’s how you can do it: (more…)