You can protect yourself from this threat by using a VPN solution provided by your office, set one up yourself, or you can use something like Hot Spot Shield (www.hotspotshield.com) which is basically a free VPN service that will encrypt all of your wireless data before it leaves your computer. This makes watching and stealing any of your data much more difficult for anyone who may be watching you. 

Another way to help protect yourself is to always use HTTPS, which encrypts your web browsing sessions between you and the website you are using HTTPS on. This will also make it much harder for anyone to watch what you are doing, or steal passwords and other information. If you use Firefox you can install the HTTPS Everywhere extension, and it will automatically take you to the secure version of popular websites such as Facebook, Twitter, Google, and more. Check it out direct from the Electronic Freedom Foundation: HTTPSEverywhere

Using unsecure wireless has always been a risk, however new tools such as Firesheep (See more here) allow even novice users the ability to hijack most websites you browse over wifi. This means a stranger can easily login to your Facebook account, Gmail, or most any other website you view over insecure wireless.

Bottom line: Secure any wireless connections you have control over, if you must use unsecure or public wireless these extra steps may save you from a major headache. 

Be safe out there in the land of the internet, its a great place but it can be dangerous as well.

If you need help with securing your wireless connection, securing your laptop against public wifi or any other technical issue Contact us! We love to help  

Image via Wikipedia

What would you do if you suddenly found yourself locked out of your favorite and very useful web based services?

Be prepared and set your recovery options now, before you need them

How could this happen you may say? I won't forget my password?
One very common way to get locked out of an online account is by being hacked, phished or just someone malicious changing your password. When this happens you often have a way to reset your password, but what if the account reset email was changed by the malicious user? It is very likely you will never see your email, photos, or data again.

To prevent this you must use additional security options to recover your password, but the catch is you MUST set this up before you loose access!

Gmail account (Including all Google services: Calendar, Voice, Reader, Etc)

Click here: https://www.google.com/accounts/b/0/UpdateAccountRecoveryOptions

You will have to sign in to access this page. Once here add your cell phone number so you can use text messages to recover your password if needed. You can also add extra recovery email address’s, as it is always a good idea to have many methods to gain access to your account.

Other Accounts

In most any web based service (Facebook, Yahoo, Hotmail, Etc) you can set similar options in “Account Settings” or somewhere similar. Be sure that you have linked as many email accounts as you can (for reset emails) and if you can add your cell phone as another recovery option.

Basic Security

• Be sure to set your recovery question and answer to that of something complicated and not easy to guess. Using your dogs name as the answer, may not be a good idea if you have ever mentioned it online!
• Use a good password – something that is long, has upper and lowercase letters and throw in numbers and symbols (&# Etc)
• Do not use the same password on multiple sites, this makes it easy to loose access to everything very quickly
• one word passwords are close to useless!

Why Backup?

• Hard drives fail every day – Just because a hard drive is new doesn't mean it cant fail. Drives become more likely to fail with age. 
• Power surges, power supply failures, lightning can make your data vanish in seconds
• Accidental Deletion
• Virus's
• Theft, Fires, or Disaster

With an online backup service you physically save your data (securely) offsite, which increases the chances of its safety in the event of disaster (Fire, Tornado, Theft) 

Options

• JungleDisk – This is an excellent service that allows you to choose what files to backup, how many copies to keep (versions), and much more. Prices are around .15 per Gigabyte and a few bucks per month for the service. This is billed by how much storage you use, not per computer.
• Carbonite – Another solid backup option, charges $54.95 per year per computer for unlimited storage. This service automatically backs up most of your important files without any setup from you. 
• Mozy – Allows you to backup unlimited files for $4.95 per month – unlimited users can use up to 5 computers, beyond that is additional $4.95 per month per computer.

Recovering data from a damaged hard drive or deleted data can be very expensive and is not always guaranteed to work. Take the time now and choose a backup service and make sure it is properly setup and operational. 

Once you have safe, secure offsite backup of your critical files and memories you can relax knowing they are safe regardless of what happens to your computer.

Of course if any of this is confusing or you would like assistance getting your backup services running just contact us!