5 Summary of Week 7
While most of this week’s learning is about how to recover from a disaster, it is worth spending a few minutes reminding yourself what can be done to minimise the risk of a breach in your security.
These relatively easy measures will greatly increase your computer and mobile device security and we have covered many of them over the past few weeks:
- each user has their own personal accounts when using a computer which are not administrative accounts
- use strong passwords (and perhaps a password manager application)
- set your computer and mobile devices to require a login or passcode when you switch them on and when they lock after being left for a certain period
- keep your operating system and key applications up to date
- install antivirus software and keep it up to date
- protect wireless networks using modern (e.g. WPA2) encryption
- enable a personal firewall on your PC and a router firewall.
You could also take these measures, which might require some assistance, or if you are in a business environment, the approval of a system administrator:
- encrypting your hard disk
- encrypting folders that contain confidential files, or files that will be backed up to the cloud
- using encrypted flash memory drives.
Look at the list of security measures above. Do you think any of them apply to you and your computer and mobile devices? Make a note of the security measures that apply to your situation and make some notes on how you could implement them.
You can now go to Week 8: Managing security risks [Tip: hold Ctrl and click a link to open it in a new tab. (Hide tip)] .