Last week, Jeremy Wheeler blogged about the perils of public charging stations. This got me thinking about some of the other ills of convenient, public life. One glaring convenient evil jumped out at me -- public WiFi. We have all been there. You're on your laptop or tablet, and you have to get some work done. Or you desperately need to set your fantasy football lineup. Or you need to get an e-mail out. Whatever the circumstance, your only choice for connectivity seems to be the coffee shop's free public connection. So you do what's natural - you connect, get the…
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OK - this one is simple. Just like you wouldn't trust anyone with your passwords, don't trust any machine or device that you don't explicitly own. A little background... I was traveling this past week for business and I happened upon a machine billed as a 'rapid charger' for your mobile device. I took notice of the 12 cables of varying connectors protruding from the front of it and thought to myself, "Hmm... I wonder what they're connected to on the other side?" And as I was completing that thought I immediately jumped to, "Nope - I wouldn't trust this…
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In honor of National Cyber Security Awareness Month this article is going to talk about how you can easily mitigate cyber risks to your work and personal accounts by simply creating and managing good passwords. We as users must remember that we are the biggest problem. But with a few small changes to our habits, we can make it better. In a previous post we talked about how to mitigate account exposure from a hack by using good passwords. And don't reuse them. Reusing your password means that if one of your accounts has been compromised then all of your…
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For those tech savvy readers out there, isn't it a blessing and a curse to be your family's on-demand help desk for trivial computer issues? On one hand it's great to be able to perform Harry Potter-caliber wizardry to fix that pesky printer because your mother-in-law somehow deleted its driver or be able to recover lost data because you knew Office had an auto-recover feature that your brother wasn't aware of. Ah, but all good things eventually do come to an end and there inevitably comes a time when you have to deliver some less-than-wanted news. I had the misfortune…
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Throughout 2015, there have been numerous reports regarding different health care companies being compromised and losing personally identifiable information (PII). Over the summer, one particular company reportedly lost data such as names, email addresses, phone numbers and health care subscriber numbers - payment and medical data were not believed to be taken. Unfortunately, we are getting used to this kind of news when we wake up in the morning. As we scan these articles, we peek to see if we are going to receive a new credit card or have to check our statements for fraudulent charges. So no payment information…
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