How To Make Computer Security Work For You

By Jason Slater
Monday, 23 November 2009

Sometimes we can forget that computer security is there to protect us and become frustrated with it. Computer security is there to protect us and our information but can appear to get in the way of what we want to achieve – if this happens we need to reassess how we want it to work for us.

Here are some ideas of how to make computer security your friend.

Passwords

Forgot a password again? Passwords are probably one of the major causes of frustration when using computer systems – primarily because they only really work well when they are long, complex and not easily associated with us. The flipside of this means it can be very easy to forget them especially when we have to have so many of them these days.

With this in mind it might be worth stepping back from the password nightmare and think proactively about them. Phrases are often a good way of remembering passwords, take a phrase you can easily remember – a memorable movie line perhaps, or something even more unique that only you will know.

For example, take the famous line from the Star Wars movie “Will someone get this walking carpet out of my way”.

You could decide to take the first letter of each word, or even the last letter of each word, or even alternate (whatever works for you). For ease, lets take the first letter and we get “WSGTWCOOMW”.

Now, you could decide to swap certain letters for numbers or symbols for example swap the letter ‘O’ with zero and swap the letter ‘S’ with the $. Now, we get “W$GTWC00MW”.

You could decide that you will always make the last two characters (or first two or whatever you like) and always make them lower case, and decide on a symbol that will always end your password, for example the exclamation mark – we now have “W$GTWC00mw!” – a complex password but because of our mechanism it can be much easier to remember than some completely random sequence of letters and numbers.

Whatever you do, please try and avoid writing your passwords down and sticking them underneath your keyboard – it really is the first place someone would check.

For managing large numbers of passwords you could check out password management software such as KeePass.

Privacy Controls

One of the many ways we can make computer security work for us is when using social network sites. Social engineering, including identify theft, is on the rise so you need to be vigilant. It can be easy to forget this information is publicly available and end up putting masses of personally identifiable information onto them – often visible by your friends (and their friends) – once the information is on it can be tricky getting it off again.

Opting out of public search visibility is something that can help protect you and your information – this will limit the number of ways people can find you but you need to decide a fair trade off with your privacy. You may also want to check if your profile page is accessible by search engines such as Google or Bing, and switch this off to prevent people being able to learn information about you outside of the social network site.

Be careful with photographs that you upload too. Some sites retain the right to reuse your photographs for their own purposes. Also, the information in a photograph could help someone identify you so pay close attention to things in the photograph such as where you are, who you are with, and what you are doing. Remember too, potential future employers may see your photographs – which is made even easier these days with photo tagging.

Always seek out the privacy controls of social networking sites and read them thoroughly.

Electronic Mail

Always, always, be wary of clickable links in emails as the text that is displayed does not always correspond to where the text says it will take you – this is often used by phishing sites. It is very easy to copy the look of a website and make the URL look a little bit similar to the one you are expecting. Any decent bank will never ask you for passwords via email, and it really is unlikely that a foreign national will simply give you $20,000,000 for safekeeping. Even viewing an image in an email can often tell a potential spammer that your email account is active so the safest thing is to treat every email from someone you don’t know with extreme caution.

If you have your own domain name for email it can be worth setting up a number of account aliases – one for private use and one for public use. Something I like to do is create a unique email address for each website or service I use – that way if I start receiving SPAM it can be easier to identify where it originated and it can be easier to deal with. If you don’t have your own domain then consider signing up to one of the free email services for those times when you need a public email address.

Make sure your anti-malware scanner is set to scan incoming electronic mail. Often, this is set by default, but it’s worth not leaving it to chance – make sure you double check in the package documentation.

Inventory

Keep a list of all your computer hardware and software together with makes, model, serial numbers, access codes, and purchase information. Keep this information safe and secure – you never know when something might fail or get stolen and the last you need during those times is to have to rack your brains trying to remember exactly what was where.

Put any service contract information into an electronic calendar so you get regular reminders well in advance of your services expiring.

Especially make a note of any, and all, non-standard drivers you have installed on your computer. Make a note of what the device is, what the driver is, where you got it from, and what version it is.

If you backup your important information, contained on your laptop, regularly to memory stick make sure you do not keep this memory stick with your laptop – otherwise if your laptop is stolen or lost so too will be your precious information. Keep a note of when you last copied your information over to memory stick and try and build a routine to back it up regularly.

Backup Regularly

How important is the information on the computer? Is it precious photographs of loved ones, or your financial accounting information? If you want to save it – then save it.

If you are planning to do a proper back tomorrow – do it today. Your information is precious so don’t be one of the people who left it too late. There are a number of online backup providers who can take care of this sort of thing for you, some of these include BT Digital Vault and Carbonite. At the very least copy your essential files to an inexpensive memory stick and put it somewhere for safe keeping.

Backing up can be easily forgotten – so make it a habit. Keep your backup process simple, say perhaps create a single folder for your files and create sub-folders to organise your files. Now, you have all your files in one place ready for quickly backing up.

Something that is worth adding to your backup are any custom or downloaded drivers you may need for your computer. If the time comes to ever re-install your computer you will be so glad you backed up your non-standard device drivers.

When using backup software to backup your important information ensure you know, and have practised, how to restore your information should the need arise.

Old Equipment

From mobile phones to old computers – the time will eventually come to say goodbye to your old equipment – and there are many ways to get rid of them, see How To Get Rid Of Your Old Or Unwanted Equipment.

When getting rid of your old or unwanted equipment, however, do not leave personal information on it. Remember to clear your phone memory, remove any old SIM, and destroy the data on any computer hard drive or PDA – simply deleting your files is often not enough. If you use a recycling company you can often opt for complete hard drive destruction which will pretty much guarantee your information is gone.

Microsoft have a good section on how to wipe your old data and offer some pointers to suitable applications, see Upgrading your PC? Protect and purge your personal files. Active@ Kill Disk – Hard Drive Eraser is a good place to start and they provide a free version – although there are many alternatives out there.