In an effort to better serve our growing customer base, NDSE is expanding our staff and sporting brand new support vans. If you see our vans around town, click the QR code on the vehicles and send us a note! We continue to hire and add quality people to our team, and are currently searching for two qualified sales team members.

If you know of someone with B2B sales experience who’s interested in joining a great team, we’d love to meet them. Please send resumes to hr@ndse.net.

NDSE is excited to introduce our new “Websites That Work” website subscription service. This brand new service gives businesses like yours a high quality, professionally maintained website at a price you can finally afford. For a flat monthly fee, you get everything from Web design and compelling site content to SEO management, blogging capabilities and social media strategies.

Our Web development isn’t just about building a website; with our services, your company will have access to a whole marketing machine. We will provide you with the tools to run a successful online marketing campaign without the hassle of dealing with its tedious management and costly maintenance. Discover how simple an online marketing strategy can be, with NDSE as your Web development partner.

Click here to find out more.

Source: Wall Street Journal
By Steven Russolillo

The New York Stock Exchange’s website experienced slowness for a brief period of time Monday afternoon, on the same day that the hacker group “Anonymous” called for an attack against the Big Board operator’s site.

There was some intermittent bandwidth saturation that prompted slowness on the site, according to a person familiar with the matter. But this person said the NYSE’s internal systems weren’t intruded upon and the site didn’t experience an outage.

Read more…

Nine Lives Media Inc. Identifies the World’s Top
Managed Services Executives, Entrepreneurs and Experts

Frank Ernesto IV, CEO of Network Data Security Experts, Inc. was selected for Nine Lives Media Inc.’s fourth annual MSPmentor 250, a global report that identifies the world’s leading managed service executives, entrepreneurs, experts, coaches and community leaders.

The complete MSPmentor 250 coverage is available now at http://www.mspmentor.net/top-250-people

This year’s expanded MSPmentor 250 coverage includes FastChat videos, executive biographies and extensive social media links. The community destination and associated links allow MSPmentor site visitors and industry leaders to rapidly network with one another.

“This is a great honor to be recognized in this way,” Frank Ernesto IV, CEO of NDSE “The credit really goes to the great clients we are fortunate enough to work with and the team here at NDSE for all of their work and dedication without them and their continuing support this milestone could not have been reached.”

“We promised to raise the bar with our fourth-annual MSPmentor 250 report,” said Amy Katz, CEO of Nine Lives Media Inc. “We’ve delivered on that goal, paving the way for MSP experts across North America, EMEA, Asia and Australia to network.”

The fourth annual MSPmentor 250 report is based on a global survey of MSPmentor site readers conducted from April through July 24, 2010. The MSPmentor editorial staff also weighed in with nominations, based on the team’s daily coverage of the managed services market. The resulting MSPmentor 250 report represents managed services experts across business, technology, sales, marketing, community development, coaching and more.

MSPmentor’s readership and editorial staff are uniquely positioned to identify the world’s top managed services experts. MSPmentor is the world’s leading managed services blog and community—and the ultimate guide to managed services.

About Network Data Security Experts
NDSE provides dependable, complete, flat-rate support for businesses throughout Virginia

NDSE provides the specialized help desk that can help you achieve your business goals. Our flexible computer services can allow you to focus on your business, instead of the technology you need to keep it running.

We offer the network solutions that can drive your business to become more profitable, productive, and stress-free.

About Nine Lives Media Inc.
Nine Lives Media Inc. (www.ninelivesmediainc.com) defines emerging IT media markets and disrupts established IT media markets. The company’s websites — MSPmentor (http://www.mspmentor.net), The VAR Guy (http://www.thevarguy.com), Talkin’ Cloud (http://www.talkincloud.com), MSPtweet (http://www.msptweet.com) and VARtweet (http://www.vartweet.com) are the leading blogs and social media destinations in the IT channel.

For More Information
Nine Lives Media Inc. and MSPmentor, Joe Panettieri, EVP Editorial Director, joe@ninelivesmediainc.com or 1.631.423.3536.

As systems and market demands continue to require better productivity and efficiency, it only follows that the software that businesses use also needs to upgrade sooner or later. Such is the case with Windows XP, which Microsoft will stop issuing support for in 2014.

Part of using any sort of software is the inevitable need to upgrade. Most if not all software needs to either be replaced and upgraded as the demands of the market entail more efficient processing of the various data and information a business handles.

Such is the case with Windows XP. While many continue to use this proven straightforward operating system, Microsoft has decided to stop support by the year 2014. Microsoft further recommends upgrading to its latest OS, Windows 7, in order for users to continue to receive OS support.

While there are some lines of business applications that have not been upgraded to work with Windows 7, most have — and there are alternative approaches. Also, your business needs the security and protection that only a current, up-to-date operating system can provide.

We understand that changing your OS will entail some expense, including new licenses, hardware, and some training. Fortunately, these things are designed to help you operate more efficiently and increase your productivity in the long run. But such change will take time, and if you are interested in starting to plan for an upgrade now, we’ll be happy to sit down with you and develop an upgrade process that meets your specific needs.

By GEOFFREY A. FOWLER And BEN WORTHEN – Source: The Wall Street Journal

Recent hacking attacks on Sony Corp. and Lockheed Martin Corp. grabbed headlines. What happened at City Newsstand Inc. last year did not.

Unbeknownst to owner Joe Angelastri, cyber thieves planted a software program on the cash registers at his two Chicago-area magazine shops that sent customer credit-card numbers to Russia. MasterCard Inc. demanded an investigation, at Mr. Angelastri’s expense, and the whole ordeal left him out about $22,000.

Read more

With hackers and electronic thieves constantly on the lookout for the latest exploits and security breaches they can take advantage of, it is comforting to know that there are also people behind bold initiatives to make our web experiences much safer.

If you think hackers are the only ones doing their research to release newer and scarier viruses and malware on the web, think again. It is comforting to know that there are also very capable people doing what they can to make the internet a safer place – like Professor Dawn Song, associate professor at the University of California at Berkeley and MacArthur Foundation fellow.

In a nutshell, Professor Song has been looking at different ways to make the internet experience more secure. Her two initiatives – WebBlaze and BitBlaze – are aimed toward developers who want to create better and much more secure programs and applications.

WebBlaze is a compilation of different strategies from Song and other like minds who tackle different problems and solutions in all sorts of platforms, and BitBlaze is an analysis tool for malicious software. While we won’t go into too much detail (it involves very complicated math), the gist is that Song and her colleagues are drawing up some very solid solutions to constantly evolving security issues on the web.

It’s exciting to see developments like these in the security industry. As threats continue to evolve, so does the means through which they are fought. The more we use the internet and the more the online experience becomes integral to the day-to-day operations of businesses big and small, the more important securing your data and information becomes. And because of efforts such as Professor Song’s, we can expect security programs to be much more effective and efficient as time passes.

Know more about BitBlaze and WebBlaze

Learn more about Dawn Song here

If you are looking to assess and beef up your security systems, we’d be happy to sit down with you and take a look at improvements that can make your business and your data much more secure.

With the growth of social networking, it is becoming increasingly difficult to separate business connections with personal connections.

November 17, 2010 was declared by Jimmy Kimmel during his television show as “National Unfriend Day”, the opportunity for all Facebook users to declutter their Facebook pages by “unfriending” people in their friends’ lists. He claims that Facebook has been “cheapening” the idea of friendship. To many the idea was hilarious, but others are seriously considering the wisdom of unfriending.

Is Kimmel on to something here? Can unfriending benefit your online business?

Research shows that as social media gets bigger, we’re getting smaller. Brian Wong, a network marketer says it simply: “With the growth of social networking, I am finding it increasingly difficult to separate business connections and personal connections.” He says that having almost 1,000 friends on Facebook has made it difficult for him to see the feeds and updates of his “real” friends and important business partners.

Lately there is a growing trend of de-scaling on the internet. People have started “pruning” their social lives online. For example, the popular Farmville app lost 30 million players this year, and people are beginning to realize that conversations and comments are more important than a huge number of blog hits.

So how can de-scaling and unfriending help your business? The drive to be more intimate can benefit your business by allowing you to form a tighter circle of customers, more successfully establishing you as a preferred channel for consumption.

Luckily, there are tools that can help you descale your social networks:

1. Path – Offers small-scale communities where people feel more comfortable sharing personal information. It controls who can view your information and does not include features that make your content viral.
2. Letter.ly – A subscription-based newsletter for bloggers who feel that public posts decrease the quality of conversations. This newsletter opens discussion only to people who pay, or who are privately invited to read a blog post.
3. GroupMe – A texting app which limits your group text participants to only 14, to ensure that meaningful dialogues take place.

What about the flip side of unfriending and descaling? While you’re considering who to eliminate from your social circles, your contacts are likely doing the same. Here are some tips to help you make their cuts:

1.       Be selective in your communications.
Of course, your product is important – to you. But not every little detail is as important to your audience. Be sure to focus on key features and benefits from your audience’s perspective.

2.       Stay on topic.
Always give relevant communications to your customers, and never rant or badmouth competitors. This is a sure way to lose customers.

3.       Provide value.
In addition to talking about your product or service, find ways to provide value to your circle of friends. Understand topics and pain points important to them, and provide valuable information and advice to help them succeed. You’ll soon come to be considered as a valuable resource to your contacts – one that they want to keep in their online social groups.

One thing is clear: quality is still more important than quantity, especially in the current economic downturn when people are downsizing everything. Start “pruning” your social network – and take steps to avoid being pruned – and you’ll reap the benefits of having a tight circle of loyal friends and customers.

Using shared Wi-Fi networks can be really convenient, but it is not without risks of its own.

These days, more and more people are on the go, and many of them bring their work with them. And in this day and age, it’s ideal if you’re working – or playing for that matter – while connected to the internet, which is often through public Wi-Fi hotspots.

While connecting to public and open-access Wi-Fi hotspots is indeed convenient, using open networks also poses risks that endanger your security. The open nature that allows anyone to use the connection also enables unscrupulous people to gain access to your private information. The whole act of stealing information from people who are using public Wi-Fi networks is called ‘sidejacking’.

There are applications such as Firesheep, for example, that provide an easy-to-use platform that others can exploit to spy and harvest personal, sensitive information from you. And since Firesheep is a Mozilla Firefox plug in, virtually anyone can download and use it to sidejack people on the same network.

You can’t be too cautious with your personal and business data these days, so you always need to have the proper laptop configuration and security infrastructure to protect your system, especially when you frequently avail of open and public networks. To know more about this, please feel free to give us a call and we’ll be happy to draw up some security options that meet your specific needs.

It seems that even the most innocuous machines in the workplace can serve as a security threat to companies. According to this report from CBS News, many office copiers save the images they copy on a dedicated hard disk installed inside them. This means that everything from mundane memos to your most sensitive information such as financial statements and contracts are stored – and could potentially extracted.

So the next time you dispose of a copy machine, if you’re not sure what’s stored on it and how to get it off – give us a call to help out.

To see the news report, watch this video.