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Passwords – the good and bad
March 14, 2011
A new study has revealed that poor passwords are as much of an issue now as they were in the 1990s with the majority of users still opting for insecure and easy to crack words and combinations. In December 2009, a major password breach occurred on the website rockyou.com that led to the release of 32 million passwords. Whilst this was a huge security breach for the sites users, and a PR nightmare for the sites owners, it did give security analysts the opportunity to scrutinise a huge data set of real-life passwords. This is the largest set of data ever analysed and the results are not good reading! Continue reading →
Top 10 blocked websites
March 4, 2011
OpenDNS have posted their annual stats for 2010 and it proves interesting reading for any business looking to lock down their net connection. The Study from DNS service OpenDNS shows that most businesses appear to be concerned primarily with employees wasting time with Facebook, MySpace and YouTube topping the charts. Perhaps unsurprisingly a number of pornographic and file trading sites also make the top 10 showing that businesses are as concerned as ever that employees do not use company resources for dubious uses.
The study also covers phishing sites and lists the top 10 targets for phishing in 2010 with PayPal coming out clearly on top at over 45%. Whilst this should not stop businesses using this very popular and useful service it does seem to imply a greater level of awareness and staff training may be needed if PayPal is in use within a business.
Check out the study here if you’re interested in seeing the stats for yourself.
Virus warning & safe surfing
March 3, 2011
Over the last few days Geek-Guru have been contacted by a number of businesses who have been affected by a particularly nasty virus that was spread via infected images on legitimate adverts.
It would seem that most of the major anti-virus brands were not able to catch this virus and we thought it prudent to advise people of some general advice for protecting computers and what users should do if they find themselves with an infected PC.
Continue reading →
Data Protection Act – PCs
March 1, 2011
If you handle personal information about individuals, you have a number of legal obligations to protect that information under the Data Protection Act 1998. The act includes sections covering access requests from individuals for which you hold data, sending data overseas, loss of data and information auditing.
The act is far too large for us to cover in one article so in this series we’ll be taking a look at some of the key areas in regards to IT security. In this article we’re looking specifically at desktop PC and laptop security.
