Tuesday, March 10, 2015
Security
Tips By World's Most Wanted Hacker Kevin Mitnick
Kevin Mitnick came by
his security expertise the hard way. In the 1990s, his electronic penetration
of some of the biggest companies in the world made him a notorious tech
boogieman, and ultimately landed him five years in prison.
Now free and clear,
Mitnick has reinvented himself as a computer security consultant and writer. He
travels the world teaching organizations how to secure their information in a
world of corporate spies and younger versions of himself. He took a break from
his jet-setting to share some practical security tips. Clip them and stick them
on your parents' refrigerator or your IT administrator's white board.
Here is Top 10 list of
steps you should take to protect your information and your computing resources
from the bad boys and girls of cyberspace:
• Back up everything!
You are not invulnerable. Catastrophic data loss can happen to you -- one worm
or Trojan is all it takes.
• Choose passwords that
are reasonably hard to guess -- don't just append a few numbers to a
no-brainer. Always change default passwords.
• Use an antivirus
product like AVG or Norton, and set it to update daily.
• Update your OS
religiously and be vigilant in applying all security patches released by the
software manufacturer.
• Avoid hacker-bait
apps like Internet Explorer and disable automatic scripting on your e-mail
client.
• Use encryption
software like PGP (pretty good privacy) when sending sensitive e-mail. You can
also use it to protect your entire hard drive.
• Install a spyware
detection app -- or even several. Programs that can be set to run frequently,
like SpyCop, are ideal.
• Use a personal
firewall. Configure it to prevent other computers, networks and sites from
connecting to you, and specify which programs are allowed to connect to the net
automatically.
• Disable any system
services you're not using, especially apps that could give others remote access
to your computer (like Remote Desktop, RealVNC and NetBIOS).
• Secure your wireless
networks. At home, enable WPA (Wi-Fi protected access) with a password of at
least 20 characters. Configure your laptop to connect in Infrastructure mode
only, and don't add networks unless they use WPA.
