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Message from the President

The value of having a spare workstation.

There you are, typing along on your computer one hectic morning, hurriedly answering emails so you can get to work on that past due client proposal. All of sudden your screen goes blank. You sit there for a minute. . .  tapping keys. . . slapping the side of the monitor. . .  you close your eyes and say to yourself "oh please don't let there be a problem with my computer. Please, not today". You reach down and try to reset the machine. . .  nothing. . .  the screen is still blank. You lob a call into Radical Support's live helpdesk and the friendly support engineer walks you through a couple of troubleshooting steps and then determines that onsite assistance is required. Because your machine is totally dead and you have lots of important things to get done (and you have no other machine you can use) Radical Support dispatches an engineer onsite that same day. The engineer shows up eager to work on the problem and hopeful that it can be repaired while he is there. He cracks open the machine and begins to diagnose the problem, calling the hardware manufacturer at the same time to open a warranty ticket. Low and behold the motherboard is fried. . .  completely toast. . .  the manufacturer says it is still under warranty and will dispatch someone onsite tomorrow to repair it. You are out an entire's day's work if you are lucky.

This scenario happens all too often. At Radical Support we make it a routine to recommend that our clients keep a spare workstation onsite that is preconfigured with all of their most frequently used applications. With such a machine preconfigured and ready to plug into the network, the above scenario would not have been so troubling. With the spare machine, the user could have called into Radical's helpdesk and the engineer could have remotely configured the spare machine with that user's personal information and they could have been back to work quickly.

Moral of the story. . .  If you don't already have a pre-configured spare machine available on your network, you might want to consider it. In this day and age, time is money and being down an hour or two is better than a day or more. If you are a current customer, please contact your TAM if you would like to discuss this easy solution to keep a user running when there is a workstation failure. If you haven't yet made the switch to Radical Support, call us before it's too late!

John Carter

If you think a promiscuous client is a scantily-dressed customer, you're in trouble. And I'm not talking about having an affair.

Think an evil twin is a horror-movie villain? Wrong again. The horror you should be bracing yourself for is not on the silver screen - and it's not from a rolling pin flung at you from across the kitchen, for that matter. Rather, the trouble is in the airwaves and targeted to Wi-Fi users.

Both the "Promiscuous Client" and the "Evil Twin" are two of the latest wireless threats to your small business. If you haven't heard of them, you probably will soon.

"What would happen to your business if your strongest competitor gained access to all of your data?" asks Greg Phillips, chief executive for AirTegrity Wireless, Inc., a Stateline, Nev. wireless security company. "Unfortunately, it is a very real possibility if appropriate controls against these new threats are not exercised."

So what's out there?

The Evil Twin.
One of the most popular new threats to Wi-Fi users is the Evil Twin, sometimes referred to as WiPhishing. It's a rogue access point that replicates another network name, such as that of a hot-spot or a secure network. "The Evil Twin waits for a user to mistakenly sign into the wrong access point and captures the user's network data or attacks the computer," says Mike Klein, chief executive of Interlink Networks, Inc, an Ann Arbor, Mich. Wi-Fi security firm for small businesses.

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