A Heartfelt Thank You
At this time of year, I always like to take some time to thank those of you who are reading this. If you're a subscriber to the newsletter, or reading this on our blog, thank you for taking time out of your day, and I'm glad you find my monthly ramblings about business and technology to be helpful, interesting, or amusing.
For those of you reading this who are also Castema customers, thank you for your business, and for placing your trust in us to handle the job of keeping your network running and your information protected. It's our goal to earn that trust, and continue to earn your business, every single month by managing your IT the right way, and by following through on our promises. So thank you, truly, for letting us do what we do best, so you can be successful doing what you do best.
Don't Let Holiday Distractions Lower Your Guard
With everything else that's on our minds, it's the perfect opportunity for clever hackers to sneak past your usual vigilant defenses. It could be some last-minute online shopping, looking for that perfect gift, and you miss some of the warning signs that an online site might not be on the up-and-up before you enter your credit card number. Or you're anxiously awaiting a just-in-time shipment before Christmas, so you think that email with the "shipping notification" might contain something relevant to your gift-giving, and you forget that none of the shipping companies ever send notifications with attachments, much less zip file attachments. Emailed greeting cards from unknown senders with links to sites you don't recognize can be dangerous too. So here's just a little friendly reminder to stay alert and use common sense and a healthy dose of skepticism online no matter how hectic your holiday planning gets this year.
Resolve to be Safer Online in the New Year
Most people's biggest vulnerability online is not from sophisticated hacking schemes, it's from using weak passwords. Most of us continue to accumulate more and more accounts for more and more online sites, which makes it that much harder to think up new and different passwords for each one. That's important because if one site is hacked, and you use the same email and password for other sites, the bad guys now have access to all your accounts.
Do yourself a favor in the new year and start using a good password manager. I use LastPass, but there are plenty of good ones out there too. I let it choose long, random passwords for every site, and then it keeps track of them all, and handles the login for me across PC, Mac, and mobile. You don't have to use a password manager if you can remember all your passwords yourself, but that's getting harder and harder for me. (It can't be due to age, can it? - Nah, couldn't be.) Whatever you do, though, resolve not to use easy passwords, or to reuse passwords.
If you really want to boost your security, consider enabling 2-factor authentication for sites like Google and Microsoft that support it. That’s where you require something else besides a password, often replying to a text message with a code, before you're granted access. It takes a few extra seconds, but for more sensitive accounts, it could be worth it.
On behalf of myself and the rest of the Castema team,
I wish you a very Happy New Year and a very successful 2016!