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This year, allow your employees some freedom to watch March Madness!

One of basketball’s biggest events is here again. The past few months have been pretty emotional for fans. This may very well make this year’s March Madness even more focused and passionate for everyone. You can choose to let your employees catch up on results with maintaining the visibility, control, and security you need to keep your business running smoothly.

This year, Wavecrest Computing offers tips that you should know from past years but also some important new ones. Having customizable reports and the ability to see rollups of time spent online, we know these new tips will help you keep up with the changes in technology and streaming!

Let’s start with these new tips! We know seeing the real Web browsing activity should not be time-consuming and cumbersome: especially for busy managers, HR, legal, and yes, even IT. So, making sure the information is easy to understand is critical for your business all year but especially during a heavy Internet-use time.

Make sure your managers have access to see the info they need, when they need it, with their own restricted access. Manager Portal is a key component for business.
Be sure you can customize reports for each manager so they can quickly and easily see their own employees’ Web usage without a lot of extra technical data. Customizable Report Templates and their drag-and-drop features makes life so much easier!
Roll it all up please! It’s important to know how much time is really spent on a web site. But with all the noise caused by ads, like buttons, share buttons, images, videos, and more…how do you know the real intentional activity you are looking for? Roll it all up under an understandable heading! Managers want to see activity for Facebook, ESPN, or NCAA! Tagging and rollup is the only thing that makes that available!

And of course, the tips you should already know to keep your business in good shape during this exciting time of year:

Not all ads or search results are real. March Madness search results or ads have been known for malware. Filtering, black/white listing, whatever way you choose. This is crucial!
Restrict sites that are inappropriate or illegal. Be aware of what your employees are doing online. Gambling sites are not just a legal issue but also tend to carry many security risks. Category filtering allows you to pick the whole category to block, the rest is taken care of.
Don’t let your bandwidth slow the rest of the business down. Make sure you are able to easily view and throttle current data usage for the entire enterprise, detect unexpected spikes that could indicate excessive data use, or just observe real-time updates. Throttling helps keep mission-critical business a priority, proactively.

The biggest tip for March Madness? Get your business set up with a Web-use management solution that will offer these tools all year long. Take it off your plate and breeze through the constant ups and downs of Internet usage. Shopping seasons, streaming seasons, current events…let them stay up to date without worrying about what it will do to your bottom line. Employees happy can easily outweigh the concerns during these times of more than usual Internet use. Be proactive… and let them celebrate.

Let us help.

This year, choose to allow your employees some freedom to watch and enjoy! Find out more about all the Web management product lines at Wavecrest Computing.

About Us

CyBlock® Employee Web Filtering and Monitoring Solutions provide advanced Web filtering, threat protection, comprehensive employee reporting, Smart Engine with machine-learning analytics, easy-to-use admin and manager portals, and more. Customers can easily configure CyBlock to monitor and manage compliance with their usage policies. CyBlock is available in various deployment options: CyBlock Virtual Appliance, CyBlock Appliance, CyBlock Mini Appliance, CyBlock Cloud, and CyBlock Hybrid.

Cyfin® provides advanced employee Web-use analysis and reporting for a wide variety of gateway devices and log file formats. Comprehensive yet easy to use, its customizable reporting and machine-learning analytics supply audience-specific Web-use information with reliable metrics, easy-to-read reporting dashboards, manager-ready detailed audit reports, and Smart Engine analytics. Cyfin is available in various deployment options: Cyfin Virtual Appliance and Cyfin Forensic.

Wavecrest has over 20 years of proven history of providing reliable, accurate Web-use management, filtering, reporting, and analytics products across various industries. IT specialists, business managers, HR professionals, Managed Service Providers, and Forensics Investigators trust Wavecrest’s Cyfin and CyBlock products to easily decipher and manage real employee Web activity, manage cloud services, reduce liability risks, improve productivity, save bandwidth, and control costs. Trusted by large government and commercial organizations such as US-CERT Homeland Security, U.S. Department of Justice, USPS Office of Inspector General, National Grid, Johns Hopkins, and a growing list of global enterprises and government agencies. We are a proud long-term GSA contract holder. For more information on the company, products, and partners, visit Wavecrest.

CyBlock® and ConnectWise® – Integration for MSPs

Wavecrest Computing is excited to announce a new feature for its Managed Service Provider (MSP) offerings, CyBlock Cloud’s integration with ConnectWise!

The CyBlock integration is built to provide comprehensive Web-use security and analytics along with the time-saving management of the leading ConnectWise Professional Services Automation (PSA) platform. With only one click between ConnectWise and the CyBlock Cloud MSP Partner Portal, MSPs can now automatically populate new client information in the ConnectWise interface, track and manage CyBlock Cloud licenses, proactively pursue timely renewals, and more. This integration is focused on saving time and improving efficiencies, allowing for increased new and recurring revenue, customer satisfaction, and crucial time to focus on mission-critical issues.

CyBlock Cloud for MSPs is a leading Web-use security, analytics, and reporting solution that will fit any MSP client business size or industry type and requires no hardware or software to buy and install, and no maintenance. Monitor, filter, and analyze data to help protect customers from Web-borne threats, such as malware, ransomware, and phishing attacks, while providing useful, time-saving tools, for example, automatically distributed, manager-ready reports, alerts when thresholds are reached, and trusted coverage over any distributed workforce.

“Wavecrest has a great managed service partner program that allows MSPs easy access to manage their CyBlock clients’ needs from anywhere, at any time. Now, we are excited to work with ConnectWise to increase the convenience to MSPs even more. MSPs can now manage their CyBlock Cloud clients directly in the ConnectWise user interface, saving time and expense that they can then use to increase revenue and focus on mission-critical issues,” explains Dennis McCabe, co-founder and President of Wavecrest Computing. “We know that time is money. Developing ways to help MSPs find more time and increase revenue while offering a product and service that surpasses expectations makes us proud of what we do, and motivated to do much more.”

About Wavecrest Computing

Celebrating 20 years in business, Wavecrest Computing, headquartered in historic downtown Melbourne, FL, has provided commercial business and government clients with reliable, accurate Web-use management and Cloud Access Security Broker products since 1996. Managed Service Provider (MSP), IT specialists, HR professionals, and business managers trust Wavecrest’s Cyfin and CyBlock products to manage employee Internet usage — managing cloud services, reducing liability risks, improving productivity, saving bandwidth, and controlling costs. Wavecrest has clients worldwide, including General Electric, Lockheed Martin, Florida Department of Health, Siemens, Department of Homeland Security, and a growing list of global enterprises and government agencies. We are a proud long-term GSA contract holder. For more information on the company, products, and partners, visit https://www.wavecrest.net.

Wavecrest Early Adopter Program

Be part of Wavecrest’s innovative process

When participating in the Early Adopter Program (EAP), you will have access to our latest innovations and emerging technologies. Having the opportunity to provide suggestions on new solutions before they are publicly released, you will play an integral part in the future enhancements to our products. We will also provide a dedicated EAP Wavecrest expert who will be there to assist you throughout the program.

How does the program work:

Simply put, you apply for the Wavecrest EAP program and select what product/features interests you most. We will provide you with access to the latest fully tested products/features. You communicate with your EAP Wavecrest expert on your progress and any issues.

Who can participate:

All current Wavecrest Computing customers are eligible to join the Early Adopter Program (EAP)

How to participate:

Tech Tip: Re-Installing or Changing Wavecrest Products

Filter Pornography Video in Bing with CyBlock

Configuration Backup for CyBlock and Cyfin

Before the end of the year, all of us at Wavecrest would like to wish all of our customers and readers a Happy Holiday and Happy New Year! We also wanted to leave you with one final product tip for the year.

If you are ever concerned about losing your configuration in your CyBlock or Cyfin product, there is no need to worry. A backup of the configuration files for your CyBlock or Cyfin product is created on a nightly basis in a folder called ‘restore’. This backup is stored in daily files for the past 30 days. Therefore, if you ever lose any configuration for any reason, our technical support team can retrieve this data from you. Simply contact technical support for instructions on sending the proper information, and they will extract the file and send it back to you.

You can contact technical support by phone at 321-953-5351, ext. 4 or by email at support@wavecrest.net.

Are Some Web Domains More Dangerous Than Others?

The simple answer is “yes.”

A recent report published by McAfee showed that specific country domains and some generic domains are more dangerous than others. The most dangerous country domain is Hong Kong (.hk) with 19.2% of sites posing a security threat to visitors. Second to Hong Kong was China (.cn) with just over 11% of sites found to pose a security threat. The most dangerous generic domain is .info with 11.8% of sites posing a security threat, while government sites (.gov) still remain the safest domains.

The report also revealed that security threats from surfing the Web have increased 41.5% over 2007. So then the question becomes, “how can I protect my Internet users from accessing these sites that are prone to harboring spyware, adware, viruses, etc.?”

There are several steps you can take to help protect your network from a Web-use management perspective.

If you have CyBlock, you can block access to those domains that are the most dangerous by using the wild card option in a custom category. Assuming that access to these domains in your workplace is not needed for the majority of Internet users, then simply blocking the domains is a good way to keep users from accessing them on purpose or on accident. Should a user ever have a need to access a legitimate site with that domain, then it can simply be added to an allow list in either a custom category or one of the other 69 predefined Wavecrest categories that you allow.
If you are using Cyfin, while you can’t block sites with a particular domain, you can still track access to them by using a custom category and running a report against that category to see if there is any activity in those domains.
Also be sure to monitor and/or block the existing Spyware/Malicious, Phishing/Fraud, Public Proxy, and Hacking categories to help protect your network.
Finally, the most important step you can take to ensure that your Internet users are surfing safely is to make them aware of Web security threats and the type of sites that are more likely to harbor them.

Wavecrest Blog

The Latest news, tips and resources straight from the Wavecrest team.