August 1st marks Pioneer-360’s anniversary; celebrating 35 years in business. Throughout the years, Pioneer-360 has grown and evolved into the SOC 2 Type II Certified Security Experts that you know and love today, but do you know where our roots started? In the basement of Joe and Cheryl’s new house, with one employee, and a drive to serve the community.
Pioneer-360 is honored to announce that we have been named as one of the world’s premier Managed Service Providers in Channel Futures 2024 MSP 501 list; the tech industry’s most prestigious list of managed service providers worldwide. Pioneer-360 is proud to be named on this list year after year, while additionally being named MSP of the Year in 2022.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been a hot topic for a while now, intriguing, and frightening people almost equally. However, recently, we have been hearing more and more about AI-enhanced cyber attacks and how they’re affecting organizations across the globe. While AI can be a fantastic tool to help automate mundane procedures, it can also become a weapon in the wrong hands, and if the target doesn’t know how to identify the AI-enhanced attacks.
Trust no one – that’s the basic principle of a Zero Trust mindset in the IT world. Zero Trust is a strict identity verification process that takes place across your organization and devices, protecting you, your organization, and your employees. Zero Trust is a process and mindset that Pioneer-360 implements daily, however – we can’t sell it to you.
In today’s digital world, staying connected is more important than ever. Your organization’s connection to the outside world starts with your phone line. Whether you’re making or receiving a call, you just want to know that the call will go through. Currently, we see a large number of organizations ignore their phone systems, assuming they’ll work every time. However, the second you pick up the phone and can’t place that call, then what? You hope and pray that the people who support your phone system will be responsive. But who supports your system? Do you even know?
Over the last few weeks, Pioneer-360 has been receiving a significant increase in requests to whitelist websites that are being blocked by our firewalls at our client’s locations. Whitelisting is a cybersecurity strategy that approves a list of websites and allows people on your network to only access the approved list of websites, while blocking all others. We do this to help create an IT environment with a reduced risk, by preventing access to untrusted sites. So, why have we been seeing an increase in requests to whitelist more websites?
Patching, vulnerability scanning, and remediation – the cornerstones of any IT department’s Security Stack. We’ve designed our remote PVR Program around those concepts. It allows us to fill in the gaps of your network, and it focuses on patching, vulnerabilities, and remediation; allowing our experts to help identify and remediate any found risk. Once a risk is identified, Pioneer-360 experts will work with your internal IT staff to schedule implementation of mitigations.
The Holiday Season is upon us and that means that you’re probably planning to do a fair bit of online shopping and browsing. This year, online Black Friday shopping rose 8%, proving that more and more people are doing their buying online. There are no crowds, no lines to wait in to check out, and no need to move from your couch, so what’s the downside? Well, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) are warning about a new clickjacking threat in popular browsers.
Last week, Joe, Cheryl (Joe’s wife), and Taylor (Joe’s daughter and a Partner of Pioneer-360) McCartney traveled to Channel Futures’ Leadership Summit and MSP 501 Awards Gala to hear the outcome of Joe’s nomination for the Lifetime Achievement Award. Although Joe did not win the award, to even be named one of the four finalists is a monumental honor. All of Pioneer-360, Joe’s family, and his community could not be prouder, because to us, there is no one more deserving of this prestigious title.
You hear it every day; cyberattacks are on the rise and cybercriminals are getting smarter, but still over 75% of organizations believe they are unprepared for and vulnerable to a cyberattack. The numbers don’t lie – experts are analyzing real-world cyberattacks to showcase the real-world threats that they pose. The Hacker News reported that over a 90-day period, The BlackBerry® Threat Research and Intelligence Team found that on average, there were 720 cyberattacks per hour, with Financial Services and Healthcare Services being the most targeted industries.