Is your company keeping information secure?

Most companies keep sensitive personal information in their files and on their computers—names, Social Security numbers, account data—that identifies customers or employees. You’ll need information like that to fill orders, meet payroll, or perform other necessary business functions. But if sensitive data falls into the wrong hands, it can lead to fraud or identity theft.

Safeguarding sensitive data is just plain good business. Are you taking steps to protect personal information? A sound data security plan is built on five key principles:

• Take stock. Know what personal information you have in your files and on your computers.
• Scale down. Keep only what you need for your business.
• Lock it. Protect the information you keep.
• Pitch it. Properly dispose of what you no longer need.
• Plan ahead. Create a plan to respond to security incidents.

more detail at http://www.ftc.gov/infosecurity

How To Keep Our Computer Secure

As I said at my last post that there are many computer’s users do not care about their computer secure. That’s why their computer become a popular target for intruders. With the high speed internet connected to your computer, intruders can easily steal your private information like password, credit card number, file or another things from your computer then use it in internet.

There are a lot of ways that intruders can use to break into your computer. They can use an email, Trojan, Backdoor, virus and more to get into your computer. So how to keep our computer from intruders? There are a few tips :

1. Keep your system patched
There are many bugs in our system, that’s why the expert always update the system become more and more secure. If we don’t patch our system, intruders can use this bug to get into our computer. So patch your system continuosly

2. Install and use Antivirus Program
A computer virus is a computer program that can copy itself and infect a computer without permission or knowledge of the user (http://www.wikipedia.com). Computer virus can damage your file or delete your file. It spread from one computer to anothers when target computer connected to the host computer. If you install antivirus program, it will detect it and prevent the virus infected your computer. There are a lot of antivirus program, like Norton Antivirus, McAffe Anti Virus, Panda Anti Virus, Kapersky and more.

3. Use a firewall program
A firewall is a hardware or software device which is configured to permit, deny or proxy data through a computer network which has different levels of trust (http://www.wikipedia.com). We need to use firewall program to maintain our data transfer through internet cause internet is the zone with no trust.

4. Be careful when reading an email with attachment
Email can become a media to transfer a virus, Trojan, backdoor from one computer to another. So when open an email with attachment please make sure that it comes from trusted person. If no just delete it, there is no advantage to open email from suspicious person.

Computer and Network Security

Today, computer has a big role in our live. Almost every activity in our live connected with computer, from study, learning, playing, listening music, and the most important thing is for working. Today, there is no office without a computer. With a computer, we can do our job more easy. We can type a mass letter easily using Mail Merge facility from Microsoft Word, make a worksheet with Microsoft Excel, presentation with Microsoft Power Point, and so on.

As we know by building a network for our office’s computer, we can do more with computer. We can share our information, file, folder, etc to all person within the network. But behind all of features that computer and computer network provide for us, do we consider about computer and its network security? Many people around the world give this responsibility to office’s Computer Administrator. Many users do not want to know how to keep their computer secure. In another side, Computer Administrator do all the best way to keep all computer in their office secure. That’s why Computer Administrator are paid higher. ;-)

There are a lot of interesting topic about computer and network security to be discussed. So I invited all people who interested with this topic please feel free to send me an email to w4w421284@hotmail.com and we will discussed this topic deeper and deeper