For example, the competition between the father, Fyodor, and his eldest son Dmitri, for the love of Grushenka, a beautiful 22 years old woman,  can teach some lessons on how to build a trusted brand in the fierce competitive market in the twenty-first century.

Now, pay attention to what John Morgan, author of Brand Against the Machine, said: he states that the only thing that really distinguishes your company from another it's your brand, and your brand is defined by how your customers and potential customers feel about you, their perception about yourself, and their confidence, and connection with you.

Your brand is defined by how your customers and potential customers, feel about you, their perception about yourself, and their confidence, and connection with you.

Let's go back to The Brothers Karamazov, Grushenka is young, beautiful, extremely attractive, and she's aware of it. Attracts attention wherever she passes. But her motivation is not noble though later seek redemption. She seeks financial independence at all costs even if it means leaving her admirers, totally crazed, and place even father and son against each other. Do not kid yourself judging by first impression, because she has a hidden history that needs to be explored. Grushenka, if she was a brand, she would have one of the components that compose a Trusted Brand: Visibility. Here is the first lesson on how to build a trusted brand.

1. Visibility is what first takes you to the door and your ability is what keeps you there. Often, many companies have incredible stories of generations of innovation and success, but you need to explore it by talking to them one, two, three or as many times as necessary until the hidden treasures are found to be used towards a greater visibility of the brand.

Dmitri Karamazov understood perfectly this lesson. A beautiful woman like Grushenka draws attention, yes, she has great visibility, but not automatically mean she was someone with whom to have and maintain a trusting relationship. Can you imagine the Dmitri's disappointment, hearing her beautiful lips, saying:
"I did not promised you anything", here we have a second lesson.

2. Attention does not equal trust. Customer trust is the most important thing for your business. Although brand visibility is key this does not equate to sales messages more thunderous. Companies need to focus on selling trust and then sales will come. Morgan believes that customers don’t care how you do “it”, they just care that you do.

After some time of relationship with Grushenka, Dmitri was completely in love. Despite having available as an option, another woman much more beautiful, rich, and stable, he remained faithful to his love for Grushenka. No other made sense. Our third and last lesson:

3. Relationship. You must build a kind of relationship with your customers and consumers to make them feel they are cheating case choose another brand. For a brand to gain authority, the company needs to be positioned as a resource and not simply as a service or product. Truth be told, its products and services do not differ much from the producer or marketer on the corner of your street. The differential is positioning the product or service as a solution to the needs of its customers. The goal is not to be perceived as a great choice of high quality, is marketing a product or service, but be perceived as the ONLY option.

Building a successful brand involves the value of what you can do for someone and it must always be believable, desirable, and achievable. Your brand may not be for everyone, and so far, so good. Your goal should be building trust and rapport with a select group of brand ambassadors who will carry the flag for you and fly it with pride.

In the novel The Brothers Karamazov, the youngest son Alexei is the hero. Young, good-natured, friendly, and spiritual. His friendship with Grushenka is such a positive influence, making she seeks for redemption, resulting in the qualities' outcrop like: kindness and generosity that were hidden despite her proud and fiery temper.

If Grushenka was a brand, and you, responsible for transforming her into a trusted brand, what would you do?

Reading the novel The Brothers Karamazov from Dostoyevsky may help, suddenly, finds an answer.

Author: Alexandre Marins Augusto
Blog: August Alexander  
More articles: Pulse At LinkedIn

P.S.: You can read a Brazilian Portuguese version of this article clicking here.

IrmaosKaramazovYul.jpg

" I'm only human   Of flesh and blood I'm made   Human   Born to make mistakes "

Create a Social Engineering Incident Response Plan

•  Put in place systems to detect and investigate potential social engineering attacks.
• Create a virtual team to respond to attacks, and consider the following areas: 

• • What was or is being attacked, and how.
  • Which resources are threatened or compromised.
  • How to shut down an ongoing attack with the least amount of disruption to the business.
  • How to recover from the attack.
  • How to implement protections against similar attacks. 

 Create a Plan For Addressing Social Engineering In Your Organization

• Determine which threats have the greatest potential:

• Determine the resources attackers are most likely to pursue and those most critical to the business.
• Analyze attacks that have occurred against your organization and those like it.
• Determine where technology, policies, or company culture creates “soft spots” that are especially vulnerable to social engineering attack

•  Determine how to address these vulnerable areas: 

• • Determine where technology or processes can be altered to reduce or eliminate the threats.
  • Create policies that make it easy for people to perform secure actions without feeling rude.

Recently, a friend who works in the area, said:
"- My relatives ask what I do at work, but I cannot adequately explain. What to say so when my grandmother one day asked me: "

How would you explain that for someone doesn't have computer skills? Your Grandma, for example?

Continue reading the entire article on my Pulse at LinkedIn.

When you’re scheduling your Skype for Business (Lync) Meetings, you can use the default options, which are appropriate for small and casual meetings with coworkers.

It’s a good idea to modify the options if:

• You’re inviting more than 10-15 people. You can have up to 250 participants.

• You want to control participants’ permissions, (IM, Audio, Video).

• You want to have a new meeting ID, which allows only people you invite to join, (added security).

• You have invitees from other companies.

Click New Skype for Business (Lync) Meeting in your Outlook calendar, then click Meeting Options on the ribbon. Here you can pick the appropriate choices for the meeting you’re scheduling.

Look especially in these options:

- Who’s a presenter?
   I recommend “Only me, the meeting organizer” or “People I choose”

- Do you want to limit participation?
   I recommend select all three options

More details about each option, see this article: Set options for Skype for Business (Lync) Meetings

Happy SfB meetings!

Alexandre

Security isn't a destiny itself but it's a journey.

How is your company preparing end users to make a safer journey through this high threat cyber road?

Information security awareness and training is critical to any organization’s information security strategy and operations.

People are in many cases the last line of defense against threats such as malicious code, disgruntled employees, and malicious third parties.

Microsoft offers the security awareness toolkit to help organizations plan, develop, and deliver a successful security awareness program.

The kit includes a planning guide, templates, pointers to material can that can help speed the development of a security awareness program, a sample general security awareness presentation that can be modified and tailored to any organization, material to help articulate the value to peers and managers, and three example awareness campaigns from Microsoft Information Security.

It's FREE: Microsoft Security Awareness Toolkit - http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=11428

By the way, if you're responsible for Security's Awareness in your organization but just thinking in do something and ever really doing then I dedicate these verses for you in case of a Security's outbreak and all what you'll ask for after several days awake, it will be: "Don't wake me up!"

"Don't wake me up, don't wake me
So much life in the city, you won't believe,
Been awake for some days now, no time to sleep...
Don't wake me up, don't wake me..."

- Song by Chris Brown

Best regards,

Alexandre Marins

As you may have seen from Reuters, the Microsoft Digital Crimes Unit (DCU) announced its tenth malware disruption on June 30th, the third since the opening of the Cybercrime Center in November.

To protect its customers, Microsoft filed a civil case against Dynamic DNS provider No-IP, and two foreign nationals for their roles in spreading dangerous malware amongst millions of unsuspecting Dynamic DNS customers and others online. With malware origins in the Middle East, this case is a clear example of the globalization of cybercrime.

Microsoft accused No-IP of negligence for being lax in its proactive security measures, allowing the criminals to exploit the service. It named Kuwaiti national Naser Al Mutairi and Algerian national Mohamed Benabdellah for the authorship and distribution of Bladabindi and Jenxcus malware, respectively. Both authors leveraged social media to promote the malware and its use, offering detailed instructions on how to infiltrate the computers of unsuspecting victims, thereby infecting millions of computers worldwide.

Microsoft is committed to keeping people safe online, playing offense against online cybercriminals. This case was pursued due to the high volume of infections to Microsoft customers; it was detected more than 7 million times in the past year by Microsoft anti-virus products. The new threat information will be added to Microsoft’s Cyber Threat Intelligence Program (CTIP) and provided to Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and global Community Emergency Response Teams (CERTs) to help customers repair the damage caused by Bladabindi-Jenxcus and other types of malware.

You can see details here: http://blogs.technet.com/b/microsoft_blog/archive/2014/06/30/microsoft-takes-on-global-cybercrime-epidemic-in-tenth-malware-disruption.aspx

Regards,

Alexandre

This is a Microsoft map infographic released at Black Hat 2013, that illustrates the various Microsoft security programs working to protect customers and their computer systems.

You can download a full copy here.

Enjoy!

Alexandre Marins

I wanted to reach out to let you know that the Microsoft Digital Crimes Unit (DCU) released the latest information about the progress in cleanup of the notorious financial cybercrime ring known as Citadel, a family of more than 1,400 botnets disrupted by Microsoft in cooperation with the FBI and financial and technology industry leaders in June.

This new Citadel data was released alongside an “@Microsoft” panel discussion at the MicrosoftInnovation & Policy Center on “Botnet Battles: Public-Private Efforts to Disrupt Infected Zombie Networks.” During the event keynoted by U.S. Senator
Sheldon Whitehouse, experts from Microsoft DCU, the FBI, the Financial Services Information Sharing & Analysis Center (FS-ISAC) and the Brookings Institution discussed how law enforcement officials can best collaborate with private sector technology companies and financial institutions to fight malicious botnets.  Botnets, as you may be aware, are armies of computers infected by malicious software employed by cybercriminals to conduct a wide variety of attacks online.

Read today’s full blog here: http://blogs.technet.com/b/microsoft_on_the_issues/archive/2013/07/25/public-private-partnerships-essential-to-fighting-cybercriminals.aspx

See u soon,

Alexandre

What about get a 100K dollars?

See how:

http://news.cnet.com/8301-10805_3-57590079-75/microsoft-offers-up-a-bounty-for-finding-bugs-in-beta/

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/06/microsoft-bug-bounty-program/

http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2013/06/19/microsoft-finally-offers-to-pay-hackers-for-security-bugs-with-100000-bounty/

http://krebsonsecurity.com/2013/06/microsoft-to-offer-standing-bug-bounty/

Details from Microsoft Security: http://www.microsoft.com/security/msrc/report/bountyprograms.aspx#

Regards,

Alexandre

I wanted to reach out to you to let you know that Microsoft announced today a new cloud-based version of its Cyber Threat Intelligence Program (C-TIP), providing near real-time information about known malware infections to participating ISPs and CERTs Worldwide, so they can help victims regain control of their computers.  Last Friday in Madrid, Microsoft’s Orlando Ayala joined with the Secretary of State of Telecommunications and Information Society of Spain, Victo Calvo Sotelo, to announce an agreement for the Spanish CERT, INTECO, to become one of the first organizations to receive data from the Windows Azure-based service.  The Spanish CERT joins the Luxembourg CERTs, CIRCL and govCERT, as an early adopter of this program, which allows ISPs and CERTs to receive updated threat data related to infected computers in their specific country or network approximately every 30 seconds. 

Since launching the Project MARS (Microsoft Active Response for Security) program in 2010, Microsoft has been actively sharing information from our botnet operations with Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and Computer Emergency Response Teams (CERTs) around the world to notify people and businesses of potential security issues with their computers and to provide them with free cleanup tools. Because each of our botnet operations has helped us cut off communication between the cybercriminals and the computers infected with the MARS malware (Waledac, Rustock, Kelihos, Zeus, Nitol and Bamital), the infected computers now check in with Microsoft. This data provides valuable information that can be used by ISPs and CERTs to notify victims and help them regain control of their computers. Now, by tapping into Microsoft’s vast cloud resources, we are able to share our cyber threat intelligence on known botnet malware infections with ISPs and CERTs in near real time with the new Windows Azure-based C-TIP cloud
service. This program will allow these organizations to have better situational analysis of cyber threats, and more quickly and efficiently notify people and businesses about potential security issues with their computers. 

More information about today’s news can be found at: http://www.microsoft.com/government/ww/safety-defense/blog/Pages/post.aspx?postID=312&aID=98.

For updates on Microsoft’s ongoing work to combat digital crime, follow the Digital Crimes Unit on Facebook and Twitter.

Alexandre