How To Engage With Technology! #cybersecurity #tech #consultant
we are back um third time is a charm right how to engage with technology is the conversation for today and we are just having all kinds of technical difficulties this morning right so we want to thank you guys so much for your patience you know i'm not the best with the technology that's imani so over here on my end i'm just pushing buttons like how do i get it right we want to thank you guys for your patience and we have a great show and a great conversation for you this morning we have cyber security expert um and consultant imani mchenry here can you say hi to the ladies imani hey everyone i just want to say thank you so much for your patience while we figured out all this technical stuff right happens it happens a lot often yes so can you tell us about yourself who you are where you're from can you tell us more about your background yes so again my name is imani mchenry um i'm a wife mother and uh currently a owner of infinite cyber tech solutions um i'm a graduate from southern illinois university with a major in information systems technology my primary focus is on cyber security i wrote i worked in the industry a couple of years in telecommunications also in healthcare and doing so that's when i kind of realized i wanted to bring it to my community and and make it real for african americans and young people such as us so that started my journey yeah so what motivated you to get ready to launch your cyber security business like what's your big motivation behind that right so um everyone everyone wants to leave a legacy right and so that's really important to me you know for my children my husband you know to to leave that legacy for what's behind us right or what's to come in front of us so that was my my number one push and then when covet arrived right and everyone was just building their brands and coming out uh there was one thing missing right and no one was talking about the urgency or the importance of cyber security especially in technology right you had consultants talking about um you know accounting uh branding and things like that right but but one of the major concepts is we're all dealing with assets right and so our assets is our revenue um and our consumers and with our consumers i mean uh private private information right and so if that was to be compromised then our business would go down right if our web pages are to be compromised then our business wouldn't be um able to be able to go to it right so when i found that that was an issue i wanted to address it because also uh our community and when i talk about our community i'm talking about african americans we rarely talk about technology or cyber security right um normally i hear people say like that you have to be really smart or that's a lot of math and actually it's not it's everyday fundamentals we talk about it when we talk about networking right you have a network of computers right and we network with each other you talk about firewalls right you have to be able to secure your surrounding area before you even build a brand right and so now there's so many people that have built that brand and now i'm just here to you know just give them that little push or that assistance and letting them know like how you can secure yourself that is so awesome that is so awesome so what mistakes you see entrepreneurs making online um that they may not be protected right but um right what mistakes are entrepreneurs um making as far as needing the cyber security what are they doing so the number one thing i see is uh interaction right everybody wants to be seen everybody wants to be heard but in doing so we're giving away uh private information we're knowing uh how much people are making we're knowing the website domains you all are using that you're hosting on um the games that we're playing you know we're giving away data right and so we're not reading the fine print of whenever you're posting or whenever you're putting a picture up or whenever you're typing you know the internet doesn't erase right you might erase something but our data is constantly saved onto servers right so when doing so that information is always able to be uh brought back up right and so the second thing is um just giving away your private information to let's just say a person that's creating a web page for you and not knowing how to change those credentials um or just being lazy you know creating weak passwords um and not fully understanding uh what we're putting out into the technical world right and so we're giving hackers that that ability to be able to get into our systems right to be able to hold our our pages hostage right and so i just want to clear the air and just you know let everybody know that when you are building a brand right when you decide to socialize with social media just keep it cute you know keep it business-like you know you go on there and you promote your business we don't need to know your personal information we don't need to know um really how many customers you have we don't need to know anything that you're using your job is basically to build your brand however they may be um concentrate on whatever systems you're using right try to um to look at those weekly you know sometimes daily depending on how what are your i your assets and liabilities um and just monitor right um creating longer passwords stronger passwords facebook might tell us that a password of of six characters is long enough right but let's concentrate a little bit more on using maybe nine characters or more right using upper lowercase characters uh using special characters um and and just try to keep it distance away from you you know anything relating to you just just keep it away from your business so what kind of personal information because i know you said don't share a lot of personal information when you're interacting with um technology online so what kind of personal information could get compromised so for example you have um there's there's a multitude of hackers right let's talk about hackers because that's that's like the known word of everyone okay right so um you have your white hat hacker so i will be considered one of those i'm very knowledgeable right but i use ethics when um i'm using my tools right and so i'm i'm a professional and i'm giving authorization to access different endpoints right and then you have your red hat hacker who's also knowledgeable like me but their intent is to bring your system down whether that system is to be your server right or your web page or your database right and then you have your blue hat hacker they're kind of like a learner they're playing with the internet um and and they're really just trying to gain popularity amongst their peers right but then you have that final hacker in which everybody knows right and that's that's the um the black hat hacker and so they have the wrong intent right their intentions is to steal uh info which is very sensitive information so you may have banking information right um your address as far as your personal address or your business address right and then um uh it could be anything from uh just your passwords uh to bringing uh your systems down uh and just using that valuable information to either sell it on the market for little or nothing and everybody has access to it or it's just to get some type of monetary um asset you know monetary gain from it so basically i know that um when i have went on a trip and i came back and when i came back my facebook got hacked right right and i couldn't get in and um someone had sent the message to all of my friends on my friends and it was like a link and everybody thought it was me and i'm like it's not me message everybody and put up a post that you know that was not me right so how can entrepreneurs protect themselves from being hacked on social media sites you know what that's a good question i believe uh monitoring right so we just get so relaxed with putting things on the internet and just as long as we created a password we're safe right but we're not because you have people or hackers that use tools right and they know if if you're not using your social media pages right they know if you're using weak passwords right and so like i stated before let's concentrate on those passwords right strengthening our passwords and um not really putting our business on social media right and it's kind of hard to do because you you want to have a social life and a business life right but for example if you put i just went out of town or you know i'm on a vacation or whatever the case may be right and you have thousands of friends you can't really keep track of who these friends are right are they bots are they real people you know and hackers their job is to sit there all day and try to infiltrate your systems right and so in doing so um you're just letting them know like hey i might not be on social media for a little while or i am on social media but i'm really not paying any attention right so just really monitoring setting second authentications on your uh your social media so therefore if someone is trying to uh penetrate your system right you'll get an email or you might get a text message right that's better than nothing and so when you get that you're able to either you know knock them out or you're able to you know go right in and change your password and so passwords are really a big thing nowadays you know you don't want to give that away to anyone you know whether it's a web page developer and if you have to then when you get your social media account back or when you get your web page back then you need to go into your settings and change those passwords right and so also what we don't realize is on our computers we have security settings right and so you want to set those security settings up even on your computer you know create you a second user you may have you may have a user account for your business but you don't want to use that same user account that you're using for your business for your social life right so you always want to keep those two things separate even if you you're able to use a whole new device you don't have to you know you're able to to set a parameter right where you can separate the two but if you can separate your business and from your from your social life all together then you're creating another barrier for yourself so that's some beauty is security is really about creating barriers and parameters right we call them firewalls right because you won't be able to get past that fire at least we're expecting but sometimes you can host it down and get through it right so we're just creating um that barrier for you that parameter yeah that is amazing advice right so that's why people always say you need to have your own personal page on social media and then you also have to have a business page on social media and i love how you have two different passwords right right right page so you're making it more difficult for yourself to potentially you know be hacked right right so can you tell us more about the services um once you launch your company that you are going to be offering because this is so important for entrepreneurs we're collecting payments online right we're advertising online everything um that we're doing is in this social media space right now right and we all as entrepreneurs we need to be safe so what kind of services um do you offer right so everyone is is a user right and so i want to provide that education especially to uh our culture right to create that barrier right so to give us the knowledge that we may need so we can be able to to create those security measures right um identity management so that's going back to creating that barrier as far as your users creating user accounts you know you may not be knowledgeable of that right but you can come to me and i can set up those accounts for you right and um you may have one person you may have two people you may have a team of ten people right and just creating those users and those passwords for you all um just in case that's that's needed right policy planning uh creating white pages which is uh the knowledge side of it right but creating those policies so you may have a team right and they don't know about viruses or vulnerabilities right so i'll give them that knowledge in which they need right um mobile security uh network defense right and um overall data security and just showing you how you can protect that from the outside going in right and sometimes you need the protection from the inside going out because it's not really hackers is a big thing right but users is the second largest um way that we can just destroy ourselves right a user can put in a usb and that can be compromised right and it could take your whole system down you know a user could be able to go to a web page that you may not want them to to go to functionally and that can take you down so you need to be protected from the outside coming in and you also need to be protected from the inside corner and i'm there to do that you have given us so much information like y'all every time i talk to her i'm so impressed because i'm not i'm not familiar with the cyber security world right right so you're educating me so i can protect my business right and so now you're educating the world so we all get protected in this technology world because a lot of us like you said people are posting we're making six and seven figures and they're posting that online and they need to make sure that um they're safe and also their customers are safe with their payments so i just want to thank you so much for coming on and talking to us about cyber security since you're the expert um now is there any tips that you want to leave with entrepreneurs today about cyber security and protecting themselves when they're online from hackers and spam and yeah yeah yeah so um it's okay to be a minimalist right in technology you know we don't have to put everything on there um know your worth as an end user or as a business owner right and so what i mean by knowing your worth is if you know that you're making these figures we don't need to know you know if you know that you have a certain amount of customers um we don't need to know right and so that's what i mean by being a minimalist right just try to be as private as you can because you don't want just anyone coming into your home right so you don't want anyone being able to come into your systems whether that just and we're not just talking about the computer we're talking about mobile right everyone uses a cell phone and so we already are signing over our rights to be able to use a cell phone it doesn't happen you know just by going on the web is is given to uh these big companies right and so you know uh anything that we put out there is being housed as stated before right and so just paying attention to our language you know what we're putting into the atmosphere right we're talking a lot about energy right and just creating the energy of privacy you know and um the expectation of of broadening your business what happened you know and just just like i said pay attention to monitoring you know just just look at if someone has been looking at your page frequently or if it's someone on there that might not be real or maybe sending you something and it looks a little fishy if you feel a little weird about it then nine times out of ten it's not right you know let's not click on everything you know be quick or anxious to win prizes you know just just let those things bypass us and so if you do receive those emails or you do receive you know scam or anything of such which you can either alert whoever is your email provider or you can get rid of it or if you hire me then i'm able to do a little backtracking and investigating and help you out yeah i know one of the things on social media is my favorite button is the block button right so no i'm serious because you will get those inboxes that say all this crazy stuff like block because i already know that some kind of either hacker spammers something is something you said something is not right right and then also you know um businesses make it hard to find out where our security functions are right and it's for a reason because it's it's a marketing tool for them right so if they're able to gain access to our to our information because we're unknowledgeable of how to set those settings then of course they're they're taking everything that we're putting on there and so eventually that data will be used you know it's used for um from anything like you know we have a technology horizon um that we're like 10 years behind right in technology and so in order for us to get to the future right we need data and so right now everyone's chasing data and and so what we don't want to do is just give them more and what i mean by more i mean them is big businesses right um give them more than what they need yeah someone has a question right um if you could answer this because we know some of the cyber security in the world you know some things we can't but we'll um ask this question and see if it's something you can answer she said what about having to provide your photo id to facebook to recover your page right so that's that's a choice in which in if you need to recover your page right but what is the reason right is it because they're saying okay someone else has access to your page or is it because they're trying to prove that you're you right because facebook uses our pictures already to verify that we are who we are right so what is the use for our identification you know so instead of just giving that that information away we need to start asking questions right because sometimes people may ask for uh information that's very important right and we just freely give it away without asking what is it needed for is it needed is it mandated right um and so in the fine print we need to start looking at those terms and conditions and finding out you know if i need my page back do i have to give my id right and then asking them right you have access to my pictures already so could you put that against the database and and let me know that that's me couldn't i take a picture with my my webcam and send you a picture to let you know that that's me because your idea is very important that's your identification right so asking those questions and seeing what other avenues you can go down without the immediate all we need to see your id or we need a birth certificate or social security card because you may receive an email saying that it's from facebook.com right but we're really not paying attention to the urls so it might be from facebooktube.com or from management at facebook.com right so just being able to look at you know those small things and see if this is what if this is what is being sent to me if this is true like well thank you so much for answering that question and thank you um i can't see the names on here thank you for whoever asked that question right so the way that you're going to be able to get in contact with imani if you have any questions is to email her so after this i'm gonna put her email up so if you have any question um you can go ahead and email her she'll also go through the thread and she'll go ahead and answer the questions that's on the thread um imania sound like you need to have a workshop for us that we don't know and we need to know like what are bots and all this stuff you were saying we need details about this right so we are expecting a future workshop from you about protecting us um in the cyber security space so before we leave can you give them your email and any ways that they can get in contact with you yes so my email is info at in infinite i-n-f-i-n-i-t-e cyber tech solutions dot com yes i love it and just let them you know just so you all know no questions are too small you know it's the questions that we don't ask that put us at risk so even if you have an inkling that something is wrong or you know if you need assistance with something just send me and shoot me an email and and i'll do my best to reply back within 24 hours yes thank you so much for being on the show imani thank you for having me forward to having you back on the show again to keep us educated because i know that in the technology world right there's not too many black women in the space right so you are absolutely amazing the education that you have is phenomenal your credentials and serving and helping others is your goal and building a legacy for your family is your goal and we love that too here so thank you so much and everybody have a great sunday having me bye bye
2022-01-16 16:20
