Saturday, April 3rd, 2010
“100 percent of Microsoft Office flaws and 94 percent of Internet Explorer flaws” are not affective if the user is not an admin, according to a report by BeyondTrust. Ars Technica has an article reviewing this report, with statistics demonstrating what I’ve been suggesting to my customers for years. That many Windows security flaws and vulnerbilities can be avoided by not running as admin or with any account that has administrative privledges.
Although the number of vulnerabilities are lower on a Macintosh, I encourage the same rule on that operating system as well.
When you setup a new computer, the first account created on both Windows and Macintosh is the administrator of the computer. Give that account a very generic name, a strong password, and then don’t use it! Create a second account for your day-to-day operations. Then create a third account for the kids, don’t let them near your data. Of course, creating an account for every one in the family is easy too.
Most people don’t like doing this because when they need to perform some actions, they need to logout of their account, login as admin, and do the administrative stuff. Don’t be lazy! Be safe! Just setup the extra accounts.
Read the Ars Technica article, “90 percent of Windows 7 flaws fixed by removing admin rights” for the details of how safe you could be.
See my previous article, “Don’t operate as Administrator“.
Tags: administrator, Ars Technica, BeyondTrust, Macintosh, Security, Windows
Posted in Operating System, Security | No Comments »
Sunday, July 12th, 2009
Live.TWiT.tv had a great discussion this week between Barrett Lyon and Richard Stiennon on the topic of the recent Denial-of-Service attack on several U.S. Government websites and South Korean websites. You can find the video of this discussion on OdTV.me.
Other related links:
Tags: Barrett Lyon, DDOS, ODTV, Richard Stiennon, Security, Twit, video
Posted in Security | No Comments »
Wednesday, June 3rd, 2009
You do backup, right? Do you backup everything and maintain an offsite copy? Excellant!
I keep meaning to write up my backup routine. But in the mean time, one area that I am weak in is backing up my Google Docs documents. There does’nt seem to be an automated way at this time. But there is a simple manual way with the use of Firefox, Grease Monkey, a Grease Monkey script called Google Docs: Download and DownThemAll.
Google Docs has become my primary suite for word processing and spreadsheets. Those things need to be backed up too! If Google turns evil or dies just when I need a document then I want to have my work available somewhere. Check out Google Docs: Download for instructions on how to get all this working together to backup your Google Docs.
Once DownThemAll is complete, all the documents are local on my computer and then get backed-up by my regular means and copied offsite.
SO the next time you are checking your backups, make sure you backup the stuff you have in the cloud too!
Tags: backup, DownThemAll, Firefox, Google, Grease Monkey, Security
Posted in Security | 1 Comment »
