According to Benjamin Franklin they are “distrust” and “caution”. There are no one-size-fits-all solution to this problem. You cannot buy a product that will guarantee the security of your systems. Paranoia is your friend when it comes to security. As Franklin said: three can keep a secret if only all but one is alive. Here are some sensible things to do to remain afloat in a sea of information:
- If you are like me and don’t want to give out your email for security subscriptions, simply check our website’s security page for the latest security alerts. You may want to bookmark it for future reference.
- Make sure, users have as minimal access as possible (just enough to be able to do their work).
- Validate backups. Do not rely on “backed up with no errors” messages. A good systems administrator will have restore drills frequently. Have restoration plans on paper ready to go in your desk drawer (just in case all systems are down and you have no access to the files or the Internet.
- Have your backup plan handy each time you perform an upgrade to the systems as they have been know to fail.
- Make sure you have the latest firmware on your firewall.
- Check processes on regular basis and watch for suspicious ones and investigate them as it may be a trojan not detected by antivirus.
- Don’t be so obsessed with technology security that you leave the server room unlocked.
Hopefully you found these tips useful. Please come back to mine more gems of security precautions and remember it is better to prevent disaster than to deal with it.