April 2007
In this issue....
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Welcome
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Disaster Plans
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Sensitive Data on Laptops
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Secure Your Handheld
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Just for Laughs
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Industry News Links
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Stay Fit While You Sit
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Industry News
ID theft
threats have surged 200%
Identity theft threats jumped 200% in the first two
months of 2007, a security company said Wednesday,
noting that fraudsters have shifted to simpler, more
effective tactics.
READ ARTICLE
Baby Steps for
Dexter The Robot
"It" is Dexter, an upright, humanoid robot taking shape and
getting exercise at Mountain View, Calif.-based start-up Anybots,
which wants to make robots more human.
READ ARTICLE
Microsoft Office
2007
If you've followed Microsoft Office through its succession of
lackluster upgrades in recent years, you might be excused for
yawning at the prospect of the 2007 version. Well, wake up: The
2007 Office System is by no means just another collection of
incremental tweaks to the world's most widely used productivity
suite.
READ ARTICLE
Stay Fit
While You Sit
Do you sit at your
desk for long periods of the day? Have you ever experienced
back, neck or shoulder pain after a long day at the office?
Perhaps you put on a few pounds after taking a desk job.
Research has shown that people who work desk jobs are likely to
lose muscle tone, experience back pain, gain weight and suffer
from increased stress.
Read
more...
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Just for
Laughs
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Welcome! |
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The TOP Monthly Technology
Report!
The TOP
Monthly Technology Report provides information, news and
events about the growing and quickly changing Technology
Industry. We hope that you will find it useful and
informative. Please let us know if you have any comments
or suggestions.
P.S.
Don’t hesitate to forward this newsletter on to friends
and colleagues! |
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Making Sure Disaster Plans Aren't Disasters
Learn
more about how wireless can add value to your business operations, and the
measures you must take to secure it before you implement it.
It's like practicing a
fire drill and discovering that the fire alarm doesn't work.
Since the early 1990s, Countrywide Financial (NYSE:CFC - News) kept
a well-honed and updated business continuity plan on how to keep
running in the face of a disaster.
The $10.5 billion company based in Calabasas, Calif., issues, buys
and services mortgages for clients nationally. It was ahead of the
curve in prepping for such events. But it didn't take long for soft
spots to develop. During a disaster drill this year, the company
found it lacked the redundant networking needed at one location to
keep data safe.
Such safeguards were in place. But they had been discarded during a
planned building move that was later shelved. The firm kept
its offices at the site. But the network redundancy was gone, a fact
that went undiscovered until the drill alerted managers....
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Should
sensitive data be stored on laptops?
Every month seems to bring another episode of sensitive personal
information escaping into the wild because a corporate or government
laptop computer is lost or stolen. A common response is a lot of
hand-wringing over how the data should have been encrypted.
But some key questions usually go
unanswered. Why is so much private data allowed to be on laptops to begin with?
What do people do all day that compels them to tote around records on, say, 26
million Americans, the staggering number seen in the recent Veterans Affairs
case?
"It's pure laziness. There's actually no excuse for it," said Avivah Litan, a
security analyst for Gartner Inc. "There's no good business reason for it."
Litan advocates a few simple steps: Organizations should keep sensitive
information only on secure, centralized servers. Workers can access the data
from PCs in the office or over private Internet connections, but can't store the
records on their own machines to fiddle with them offline.
Many companies give storage-rich laptops to employees whether they really need
them or not...
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more... |
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How to Secure Your Handheld Device
 Losing
your PDA or smartphone can pose a security risk, but the evolution of viruses,
Trojans, and worms means that your handheld devices can be subject to insidious
online threats as well.
Below are a few guidelines on how to secure handheld devices in your small
business:
Establish a security policy that outlines how handheld devices should be used.
Include where the devices can and cannot be used, what information can be stored
on the devices, who is allowed access to what, how to create strong passwords,
and specific programs and applications that may be downloaded and used.
Use file encryption and authentication. If data is lost or stolen, that
information will be unreadable without authentication and use of a decryption
key. Most devices are equipped with these security features, but third parties
also offer data encryption that's more difficult to crack.
Only beam, or transmit data, from and to protected sources. If one source has a
virus, you risk 'cross-pollination.' In order words, if data from a PDA has a
virus, it could be introduced to the network when the device is synched to the
desktop.
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