Top tips is a weekly column where we highlight what’s trending in the tech world today and list ways to explore these trends. This week, we’ll look at three common holiday season scams and how to spot and avoid them. ‘Tis the season to be jolly—and wary. The holidays are the time when friends and families come together, make merry, and revel in the festivities.

In a surprising development, Bumblebee Malware (a popular malware downloader) has resurfaced with an approach that was believed to be long gone: VBA macro-enabled documents. This comes just four months after Europol dismantled various trick bots—including Bumblebee, IcedId, Pikabot, TrickBot and systemBC—during a crackdown called Operation Endgame.

Firewalls are the guardian of your network, effectively blocking unnecessary ports and potentially harmful IP addresses. With a list of ports or IP addresses to keep an eye on, your firewalls will make sure you never have to go through the discomfort of coming across those on the hit list. Consider your firewall as a proactive measure that ensures only authorized traffic is allowed, thereby maintaining a secure environment.

In today’s complex threat landscape, MSPs must safeguard their clients’ endpoints, including laptops, desktops, tablets, and mobile devices, from cyberattacks. Prioritizing endpoint protection is essential to shield clients from the relentless evolution of malware, viruses, ransomware, and other threats.

Healthcare has become more digitized; medical devices play an increasingly vital role in patient care. Alongside these advancements, any medical device connected to the internet can become a vulnerable entry point for cyberthreats. Hospitals and healthcare providers must take proactive steps to protect these devices, ensuring their reliability while safeguarding patient data and network integrity.

ManageEngine DDI Central now facilitates Open Authorization (OAuth), which can be configured with your organization’s SMTP servers for implementing secure, reliable mail authentication for clients. OAuth provides credential-less authentication for accessing SMTP servers to send emails efficiently. It benefits users in a safe, secure approach to permitting third-party applications to access users’ SMTP servers without using their credentials.

Top tips is a weekly column where we highlight what’s trending in the tech world and list ways to explore these trends. This week, we explore four ways organizations can secure their OT environment. Operational technology (OT) has evolved from largely manual processes to digital, automated, and data-driven processes in recent years. As more industrial processes go digital, organizations in this sector now face a vastly expanded attack surface.

For any company in the IT industry, it is virtually impossible to function unless a lot of personally identifiable information and confidential data flows through servers across deployments every single day. While working with this kind of data, companies need to be watchful about the state of its encryption. This information needs to be encrypted both when it is stored (data at rest) and when it is transmitted (data in transit).

Imagine all your online activity being put out in the open—as private as a billboard in Times Square. Before SSL, your private internet information was vulnerable to exposure. However, with the advent of SSL, encryption became part of how the data was transferred between web browsers and servers, ensuring privacy and security. SSL transforms regular HTTP into the more secure HTTPS, safeguarding your online activities.