I spent the day with High School students and teachers. In the morning I teamed with Rick Gaisford to give a presentation about troubleshooting Macs. In the afternoon James Christensen and I reviewed Desktop Security best practices.

I enjoyed my time here. We are assembled at Southern Utah University (SUU). I'm told that 125 people signed up for the Cyber Corps Boot-up Camp and 165 showed up. Now that's the sign of a good program.

This afternoon I reprised my Rural Schools Conference security presentation. I prepared a PowerPoint presentation in July and altered it slightly for today's session. I've thought a good bit about what we are going to do about desktop security. My bottom line theory is that everyone must become a system administrator. We no longer have the luxury of ignorance when it comes to working with a PC. That means Windows or Mac or Linux. Here is my consolidated list of activities that every user is responsible for:

Develop a password strategy

Patch your machines

Use Ad-aware and run it at least once a week

Use anti-virus software with the latest DAT files

Dump your hotmail accounts

Clean out temp files

Beware social engineering

Guard sensitive information

Back up your data

So, become the system administrator for your machine. Don't depend on anyone else to do it. If you expect someone else to take responsibility to secure your data you will be disappointed........
10:18:06 PM    comment []