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Cybersecurity

Are public WiFi’s Safe?

A friend of mine and I were together at a venue, and I asked him if he was able to get on the local free Wifi that was provided. He said, “I usually don’t go on public wifi because I don’t think it’s secure.” This article describes what I told him I thought the real risks were so he could decide if he could use it safely. First, when connecting a Windows PC to public WiFi, the computer will ask what kind of network you are connecting to. It usually offers three choices: Public, Home, and Work. What you choose here makes a big difference in how secure your computer will be as it adjusts the firewall along with controlling your file-sharing features. Always select the public type when connecting to a public WiFi. Second, I explained that as long as whatever he was doing had a secure connection, denoted HTTPS: in the address bar, then the communications between his computer or phone and the web server are encrypted. Having HTTPS before the address in the browser means that anything he typed into the browser and sent on a form or anything he read from the site would not be observable to a third party. Sure, someone could intercept the transmission and look at it, but they would see gibberish. Hackers can snoop unencrypted communication that is without the S on the end of the HTTP in the address bar very easily. This allows them to see things like your login name and password in plain text. They can use this information to log into your account at will and wreak all kinds of havoc. So, make sure what you do on public Wi-Fi is encrypted. Third and perhaps most importantly, I explained that any real danger from using public wifi comes from poor security on your end. In other words, if the device you are using to access the public WiFi is not correctly configured and secure, you are at risk of threats.  What kind of security problems can leave you vulnerable?  Well, here are a few examples: Your computer’s firewall is turned off You fail to identify open WiFi as a public type of network Your computer is not up to date with the latest security patches Your computer’s antivirus is not up to date. I told my friend, he can use the WiFi safely as long as he’s made sure that the necessary security requirements of his computer have been taken care of and the sites he’s communicating with use a secure protocol.  To be even more secure and private, you can use a Virtual Private Network (VPN) which holds all your communications inside an encrypted tunnel. Not only does a VPN provide excellent security for your PC but it protects you from honeypots as well, but we’ll save that for another blog article.  Do you feel safe using public Wi-Fi? Have you had any concerns or bad experiences with public Wi-Fi? Please feel free to comment below, and we’ll discuss!

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Are You in the Dark about Downtime?

Even the most reliable systems can go down, and you deserve to know what is happening! Here are some thoughts on what you should be able to find out when a critical piece of your Information Technology fails. As a managed service provider, we take great care to keep our customers’ systems up and running with minimal downtime. Things do break occasionally though, and it’s very important to keep our customers informed. Take a look at my blog entry about unexpected power issues for example. When a key piece of your technology goes down, you need the problem quickly acknowledged and you should be kept up to date as to the progress of its resolution. On Wednesday this past week, the part of Google’s GSuite that controls Calendar and Hangouts conversations stopped working for a few hours for us.  Rather than beat my head against the wall trying to see if the problem was on my end, I went out to their status website at AppStatus and saw there is a service outage affecting the areas of the product I was having problems with. Though it was frustrating to have systems that I rely upon be inaccessible, I appreciated how well Google communicated the status of their systems. By clicking into the details, they very expertly communicated what systems were having problems, the target time for when they believe it will be resolved, and finally, the news of it being fixed and fully operational again. While we can’t all have as robust, automated systems as Google for communicating outages, several essential things are good practices that IT Managers and managed service providers should follow. Acknowledge the problem. Scope the problem – are all systems down or some?  Are all users affected or only some users? When can a fix be expected? Announce when the problem is resolved. Conduct a root cause analysis to see what steps can be taken to avoid a recurrence of the problem. Following the above steps at a minimum will help keep your users informed and at least amicable while you work toward a solution to their issues.

Are You in the Dark about Downtime? Read More »

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