Posts Tagged ‘security’
Is total IT security possible?
A participant at one of my presentations this year requested I tell them how to achieve, verbatim, “Total protection from employees able to reach or steal client data from work or home.”
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Thieves preying on your social media
ABC’s Good Morning America recently posted a video about a woman whose home was robbed after she announced on Facebook that she was leaving her home to go to a concert.
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Windows 7 is scheduled for release – should you switch?
Windows 7 is officially scheduled to be released on October 22. There are several ways you can try Windows 7 today if you want to use it. Visit www.microsoft.com for details. Should you switch?
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Understand more about identity theft
Watch NBC Dateline’s video, “To Catch an Identity Thief, ” with no commercials: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17805134/ns/dateline_nbc-to_catch_an_id_thief/. Scroll down and look on the right hand column for “Videos: Part 1 – watch the entire episode” and “Videos: Part 2 – watch the entire episode”
How do you stop users from stealing your data?
Business owners and corporate executives often complain that they cannot control data once they trust their end users with it. Furthermore, regulations are requiring that organizations ensure their data is secure.
There are documented problems of employees “taking data home to work on it” and then they lose their memory stick, hard drive, or laptop and the data falls into the wrong hands. Other employees copy data and send it to competitors. In addition, often, users unwittingly send out private information through insecure channels.
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When will people learn to scramble laptop data?
Once again, I have met a new client that suffered a data breach because they lost a laptop. The news is filled with examples of this information. First of all, why are customer names, Social Security numbers, addresses, and phone numbers allowed to be stored on computers? Frequently it is without the company’s knowledge.
The simple solution? Have your IT professionals use full disk encryption on all laptops and then even the desktops. This means the data is scrambled on the device until the user enters their normal login. The setup is simple, the computer remains fast, and the user needs no additional training.
If your IT department isn’t setting up full disk encryption for all computers yet, ask them to start today.
Microsoft releasing important patch Today at 1pm Eastern
Early this week a major bug was discovered in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer – IE – that would allow code imbedded in web sites to potentially exploit the computers who visit those sites. This has many people wondering if they should use a different browser besides IE.
Some people choose to use a different browser other than IE. I use Firefox, Chrome, and Internet Explorer depending on the task. You may choose to switch browsers or use other browsers as well. Just keep in mind that ALL browsers need to stay patched and current. If your organization uses WSUS for patches, keep in mind that WSUS will patch IE but will not patch Firefox centrally – a reason to consider staying on IE.
The most important thing is, no matter what browser you use, be sure to keep all the applications, operating systems, and firmware in your devices patched with the latest security patches. If you continue to use IE, be sure to backup your computers and apply the patch using a staged deployment when Microsoft releases the patch on Wednesday.