Web Security – How Do You Know If A Site Is Safe?

The Internet can be a dangerous place! We all love to scour the Internet for a bargain, but beware the bad stuff out there that can steal your credit card details, Paypal login, or turn your PC into a “zombie” that can be used by spammers and password thieves. Web sites that have been hacked and are being used to disseminate malicious software don’t advertise the fact .. in fact the web site owner probably won’t even know about it.

How Big A problem Is Web Security?

If you visit a compromised web site and your PC is missing the latest updates, you stand a good chance of ending up with software on your PC that you didn’t ask for. The problem is that it isn’t going to introduce itself and shake your hand! A bit like the neighbour you didn’t invite to your barbecue, it came along uninvited and it’s going to make a nuisance of itself.

How Do I Know If My PC Is Infected?

You are unlikely to recognise that your PC has been infected straight away. Internet malware can sit there silently waiting for you to connect to your online bank account so that it can steal your login details or send out so much traffic that it clogs up your entire network as we saw with one of our customers recently. Eventually though your PC will become unusable as more malware gets downloaded at which point you need to call your IT support company.

Which Are The Most Dangerous Web Sites

It's not just “Sex and Drugs and Rock and Roll”  web sites that are potentially dangerous. According to a Symantec study in 2012, 61% of malicious web sites are regular web sites that have been compromised and infected with malicious code.

The Top 5 Most Exploited Web Site Categories - % Of Total Number Of Infected Websites

1.       Blogs / Web Communications - 19.8%

2.       Hosting / Personal Hosted Sites – 15.6%

3.       Business / Economy – 10%

4.       Shopping – 7.7%

5.       Education / Reference – 6.9%

Whilst these figures are based on 2011 data, the percentages won’t have changed much, and new around 9,500 malicious web sites are being found by Google every day.

How To Protect Your Computers Against Internet Malware

Home users need to make sure that their security is kept up-to-date. Make sure that you enable automatic updates for Windows Updates and keep applications such as Java and Adobe Acrobat updated as well. Malware exploits bugs in software that is installed on your PC to upload malicious code to your system, and regular updates are your best defence. There is no  need to shell out large amounts of money for security software though. Microsoft Security Essentials is free and good enough for home use. 

If you are a business, the same principles apply, but you need to take your IT security a little more seriously:

• Make sure that all Windows / Java / Adobe updates are applied to your computers on a weekly basis.
• Make sure you run commercial security software.
• Monitor your PC’s for tell-tale signs of trouble.
• Use web security software to block access to known infected sites as well as pornographic / illegal / non-business material

A little common sense also goes a long way. If you are asked to click on a link in an email, or a Facebook / Twitter post, engage brain before clicking. Is the person that it came from likely to have sent you a link to ”Some hilarious pics of you”? If in doubt, don’t click! 

Is Google Apps for Business Right For Your Company?

“How can I use cloud computing in my business?” is probably the number one IT question that I get asked. It can be a hard  question to answer because the cloud isn’t just one technology, and it all depends on what you need from your IT. Very often, small businesses owners simply want to store files in the cloud and share them with colleagues and clients, and I increasingly find myself suggesting to people that they should at least look at Google Apps for Business.

Google Apps for Business is the cloud equivalent of the Swiss Army knife.  It has a number of components:

Google Mail

Most people know about Google Mail, but many people aren’t aware of Google Apps for Business which works pretty much the same as the personal version of Google Mail, but you use your own domain (e.g. clearview.co.uk) instead of the Google domain of gmail.com.  You can also personalise the system with your company logo (see below).

Google Calendar

Google Apps provides a  calendar to help you organise your time. You can share your calendar with your colleagues and vice versa. In addition to scheduling meetings, Google’s “Tasks” component allows you to create a “To-Do” list which I keep on the right hand side of my screen. It’s no substitute for a CRM system, but it helps me to organise my activity for the day.

Even if all you got was email and calendar, surely Google Apps for Business has to be the cloud’s biggest bargain at £3.30 per user per month for businesses, and absolutely free for non-profit organisations. What’s more, if you have grown attached to using Microsoft Outlook as your email and calendar software, there’s no need to change. You can configure Google Apps to synchronise all of your email and calendar entries with your Outlook client.

But that’s not all! You can also use Google Apps for Business to store documents online and synchronise them with a folder on your laptop / desktop PC using Google Drive.

Google Drive

Google Drive allows you to store and share your files online and integrates neatly with Google Mail. There are two ways to access your Google Drive Files. Firstly, you can download and install an install programme from your Google account which creates a synchronisation folder on your laptop or PC. You can then drag and drop files and folders into your Google Drive folder and synchronise them with your Google Account.

  

Secondly, you can upload files to Google Drive using a web browser. This is a simple “point and click” operation that allows you to upload files to your Google account from any internet connected device.

Once a file or folder has been uploaded to your Google Drive account, you can share it using a right mouse click and clicking on the “Share” menu option. Files and folders can be shared with colleagues in your own organisation as well as with clients and business partners. You get the option to send an email to the person that you have shared the file or folder with.

Word Processing and Spreadsheets for Free!

In addition to email, calendar, file sharing and collaboration, Google Apps also provides you with a basic word processor, spreadsheet and drawing application at no extra cost. They aren’t as sophisticated as the Microsoft applications, or even Open Source suites such as LibreOffice, but if you only need basic word processing and spreadsheet functions, they do the job. I tend to compose everything in my favourite Office suite and just use Google for storage and collaboration. 

Great Value Cloud Computing For Small Businesses

Having moved over from Microsoft Exchange about 18 months ago, I'm a big advocate of Google Apps for Business. It's great value for money and there are ways that you can overlay automatic encryption to ensure data privacy. If you are a start-up and looking for a low cost way to store / back up data files in the cloud, as well as share files with your colleagues and clients, it's hard to fault.

Proper IT Maintenance Is Good For Business.

Don't you just want to tear your hair out when your PC goes all cronky on you? Computers may just be a handful of printed circuit boards, a processor and a disk drive or two, but they sure seem to know the very worst time to embark on a go-slow, or even blue screen if you are one of the unlucky ones hit by a bad Windows update or some malware downloaded from the Internet. According to Brother International’s Small Business Survey, business owners now recognise that IT failure is a real drain on their bottom line profits:

• 75 per cent of small business owners indicate that a computer failure is more disruptive than an employee being taken sick.

• 77 per cent stated that a technical fault has hit their bottom line profits through missed deadlines or lost business opportunities.

• 66 per cent of small business owners say they are frequently confused by the technical tools at their disposal to run their business.

• 86 per cent additionally admitted to losing staff productivity due to technical problems.

• 31 per cent of respondents went so far as to say that they would give up a week’s worth of their hard earned holiday to make sure that they would never be hit by technical malfunctions again .

While business owners who felt the need to safeguard cash to withstand the effect of a further economic downturn increased from 44 to 48%, 52% see that investing in technology can help to give them a competitive advantage in their market.

From my perspective, I see that there are 3 key points for small businesses:

Proper Technology Management Produces Bigger Profits - Technology, and specifically proper management of technology can help businesses to increase their profits. If you can manage your technology properly, it will fundamentally fail less frequently. Taking care of technology will help you to take care of business!

If You’re Not a Tech Whizz, Find Someone Who Is! - As a business person, if you aren’t tech-savvy, you to partner with a company that is. If you can find the right IT support partner, they should be able to advise you on ways that you can use technology to best serve the needs of your business.

Technology Business Wins Start At The Top - 52 percent of people are right! You can use technology to make your business run more efficiently. The desire and the drive to change business processes for the better however needs to come from the business owner, both to make sure that your IT company produces the answer to the right business problem, as well as to promote adoption within the business.

You can download the Brother Small business Survey here:

There should be exciting times ahead for small businesses who have survived the recession, and technology can help you to become a lean, mean business machine. 

Protecting Your Online Privacy Part 2

Welcome to part two of my personal battle against pesky password thieves. Don't be the one that becomes their next victim! Last week I explained briefly the danger of password hacking of web sites such as Amazon and Paypal. Nobody wants to have to remember multiple passwords, so they reuse their Paypal and Amazon passwords for other web sites such as Twitter and Facebook. The problem is that if your password for one web site is stolen, you could be the next victim of online fraud.

Remember The Golden Rule .. Don’t Re-Use Passwords!!

It is a real pain to have to use a different password for each of your online logins, but once you have been bitten, you realise that it’s worth it. My heart stopped when I saw that someone had transferred £680 out of my Paypal account, so it’s not going to happen again in a hurry. Realistically, you need to keep a spreadsheet of your passwords for your online logins. Not only that, but you need to make them good passwords including upper and lower case letters as well as special characters. 

My Password System

I worked out a system that I am happy to share with you because it works for me. You can adapt it and make it more complex. It all depends on how obsessive you want to be about it!

My recipe for password security has three simple ingredients:

• A number of 4 or 5 word phrases
• Some special characters that you alter for each login
• A string of character that you are going to remember. Make it the first part of your partner’s vehicle registration plate or something equally memorable.

You then create a system using a spreadsheet and a little imagination. Here’s one I cooked up earlier based on the first letters of the words in Beatles songs:

Needless to say you don’t have to use Beatles songs. You could use book titles, proverbs, recipes or just about anything else the will give you a number of phrases of 4-5 words. Just devise your own system, work out where you are going to put your special characters, which letters will be upper case and which will be lower case and generate as many passwords as you need. If you want to be really fastidious you may want to use an application such as 7-Zip to store the spreadsheet in a password protected zip file. Just make sure that you can remember that password … and make it a good one!