The Internet has made our World smaller and in doing so has created many new ways for connected individuals to share and distribute information. As with all great things, there are people who pervert those innovations to cause harm and destruction. Cyber criminals are always finding new ways to compromise vulnerable systems. Sometimes they do this for money and sometimes they do it for fame in the cyber-criminal community. There are many different kinds of attacks a cyber-criminal can conduct on a computer system but if you take care of the basics, you can keep yourself from becoming low hanging fruit for these criminals. One of these basics is your password. First, if you don’t have a password to get into your computer, you need to create one right now. If your password is a name or word from the dictionary, you are a target. A strong password should be at least 8 characters, contain upper and lower case letters, numbers and a symbol. This makes your password exponentially difficult for a cyber-criminal to run what’s known as a “brute force” attack on your computer on network. You should also take the time to change this password every 90 days. If you change your password more often, that’s even better. It’s also a good idea not to have the same password for everything. The password to log into your computer should not be the same as your Gmail account, iTunes account, bank account, etc. There is a nifty little program called KeyPass that can help you store all of your different password in an encrypted format. I highly encourage you to check it out. For those of you that have Word or Excel Documents on your computer that contain your passwords for everything, that’s a risky practice. KeyPass is a much safer way to keep a record of your accounts and passwords. For help with making sure your home or office computers and servers are secure, give Firma IT Solutions a call today. We are ready to help. Have something you want me to cover in Tech Talk, tweet me @FirmaIT or facebook.com/computerslow
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