Security's Everyman

Security's Everyman

Thursday, January 04, 2007

Wireless Security

Preston Galla has written an article on Computer World about how to secure your wireless connection when connecting to a "open" hot spot. Of course it attracted my attention since I've been on my kick of late about users getting owned for doing unsafe and careless things. He has 10 steps that he recommends. All of them are good suggestions that will help protect you. In my opinion they are things that we all should be doing anyway no matter where we are. The problem with them is that getting "joe" user to do them will be next to impossible. Not to mention the support nightmare that it would create because they did something wrong or something won't work due to these precautions. If we could get users to do at least some of them it would help to a degree and every degree counts.

2 comments:

Tim said...

Andy,
I think this is a good article as well. From a business perspective, if they are using a corporate laptop, shouldn't these settings already be defined? This seems like a basic task that most IT staff should be doing. Now for the home user or college student, this is great information, but I don't think they are reading computer world. So I guess the question is, how do you get good information like this into the home users hands.

Andy, ITGuy said...

Tim, You are right in stating that these settings should already be defined by the IT dept. When I wrote this I was specifically thinking about small companies that are not defining these things. There are LOTS of smaller companies that don't implement policies like this b/c of lack or knowledge, political issues, etc... A good Security Awareness program (which also is lacking in many companies) would go a long way to help where policy is lacking.

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