Preventing a hack attack

I work with a lot of attorneys who have a great deal of confidential information on their systems. Recently one of my clients was involve in a very high profile case. For some reason, (if I told you why, they would have to kill me) the client started to worry about someone hacking into his system and stealing his data.

His fears, real or just good old paranoia, started a discussion about online security and firewalls, etc. The client was afraid that someone could hack into his system and get to his files. He went so far as to remove the files from his system, in order to protect them.

Most of my clients are small businesses and small offices. The average size is 10 systems. Most only have their routers as a firewall for protection from incoming threats.

Is that enough? For the majority of my clients, I think it is. Unless we have opened a port in the router, then it is going to be really hard for a hacker to target a specific machine on the network.

I do have a few clients who have opened ports for remote access, using either NetOP or Terminal Services from Microsoft. On most of these systems, we have moved from the standard port, 3389, to confuse anyone pinging the ip address.

My suggestion to my client who was worried about his data was to put bars on the office windows. No not on MS Office, nor on MS Windows, the window through which a petty thief would through a brick and then steal the secretaries computer that has all the data on it.

Let me know what you think,

Marc

The Technology Pro – RSS is Really Simple

If you have spent any time on the web lately, I am sure that you have come across the RSS icon’s on many of your favorite blogs and websites. RSS stands for really simple syndication.

Even though RSS claims to be really simple, there are many who don’t quite understand the concept or how to use it. Once you understand how RSS will benefit you, you will see that it truly is really simple.

Syndication allows content to be pushed to a reader. Let’s say you have a blog and you are writing entries on a regular basis. It is important to you that a notification of your new entries gets sent to all you readers. Otherwise you are just posting for your mom, and she really doesn’t get it anyway.

In the early days of blogs, most bloggers would just send an email to their list announcing a new entry. With the advent of spam and spam blockers, unfortunately, many of these emails didn’t go through. RSS to the rescue.

With RSS you no longer have to send an email announcing a new post. All you have to do is get all you readers to subscribe to you RSS feed. Whenever you create a new post, your RSS file gets updated. Readers who have included your site in their news readers will automatically get a notification when the reader checks your site feed.

Most blogging programs will automatically create this RSS feed for you. As you create new posts, the feed is updated. Your new post is now ready for the readers to query.

For those of you who would like to be notified on my new posts, just use this link:

http://www.thetechnologypro.com/atom.xml

You may have to cut and paste it into your news feeder.

Let me know if it works,


Marc