Are You Being Proactive About Virus Protection?

There is a new virus making the rounds that infects PCs and infiltrates your mail system. If you get this message, you need to change your email password and also scan your PC for infections. (It is actually a trojan and is not always easily detectable with standard virus software.) Please note that this is not the only virus of its kind, just the latest. Here is an overview of what happens, and how you can infect all your friends.

1. You get this trojan from an email or a website and be unaware that it has even infected your computer.
   
2. The infection sends emails to your contact list (up to 10 people at a time). So, it appears they have received an email from you that contains a holiday greeting.
   
3. In the message is the link (shown at the bottom of this post). Since it has the word Christmas in it, many are led to believe it is an e-card.
   
4. After clicking the link, they are redirected to a website selling Viagra that is infected. If their PC does not have excellent virus protection, it will infect it too.
   

In order to ensure that your computer is safe from any infection, there are a couple things you can do. Always be sure to scan your PCs for virus and spyware infections before you do anything else on your computer. Serious infections are learning to hide from your virus software. Some viruses send emails, others steal passwords and credit card information, and others slow the PC down while causing strange error messages. We have also seen some PCs of late that appear to have hardware or operating system corruption. Standard virus and spyware scans do not reveal anything, but specialized software that finds trojans and rootkits discover the real issue. So please be proactive: scan for viruses and/or call your computer support expert to be sure your PCs are clean and optimized.

What the faulty link says:

htt:/dragonucleon.perso.sfr.fr/christmas.php?holiday

How to Complete a Data Security Audit

Companies gather new data on a daily basis, and sometimes this information is private and needs to be kept secure. This can include Social Security and credit card numbers, so it is also important to keep track of who has access to this information. Here we have outlined the best practices to make sure that you are keeping your data safe, which is considered a data security audit.

WHO has access to private information in your company? Is it possible for every employee to get a hold of the data? What information can vendors or institutions (banks, contractors) retrieve?

WHAT type of data are you storing? Is it login info and passwords? Is it credit card information? Classifying and categorizing your data is a major way to evaluate if it is protected.

WHERE is your data stored? Be mindful of data that is stored both physically and electronically. Storage locations include email attachments, employee cell phones, home offices, file cabinets, and more. We are constantly sending data through various forms of technology so it is important to remember this.

HOW does data enter, travel through, and leave your company? Many different people might be sending you data, from customers to financial institutions. Is information gathered through a secure web form or by an email message? This is a major way to evaluate how secure your sensitive information is.

WHY is a data security audit necessary? Protecting data is a major responsibility of any business and conducting this audit will ensure that your business is partaking in security practices.

If you need further assistance about how to conduct a data audit, feel free to contact CMIT!

Using Facebook For Your Business

Creating pages for your business on various social networks is the next step in promoting your company. Facebook offers many different options and each business should try and make the most out of it. On Facebook, there’s the ability to include links, post videos and photos, and manage discussions.

The ultimate goal of the page is to get people to “like” it. It may be helpful to set a particular goal for the upcoming year of how many people you want to like your page. In order to achieve it, make sure that the page is updated frequently. Staying continuously involved in social media is more important than just having a page.

In order to generate a community, it is recommended to pose questions and comments with a minimum of three posts per week. Posting various types of multimedia is a great way to inform users about your industry as well as your particular company. Remember that success with any social media network takes time in order to build relationships and develop the desired social dynamics.

Read the complete article by Mashable here.

Keeping Your Passwords Safe

Most websites seem to now require you to make an account in order to shop, check the news, or access your bank account. Many people tend to use the same password for every site, but if a hacker learns of this password, they then have access to every account you have. This stresses the importance of using unique passwords that cannot be easily guessed. After the recent Gawker incident where their account security was compromised, it is once again encouraged to create strong, different passwords for every site. They released a list of commonly used passwords which can be looked at here. It is suggested to use a random order of letters and numbers that cannot be easily guessed. Keeping your passwords secure is the primary way to keep your information safe.

Archiving Your Emails in Microsoft Outlook

Often times if Outlook is running slower or differently than normal, it could be due to the size of your inbox. Performance can slow down if it is larger than 2 gigabytes. In order to check this, right-click on the folder and select Properties. From there you can click on Folder Size. The AutoArchive feature is designed to alleviate this, but the default settings of Outlook do not archive your inbox automatically (only sent mail, deleted mail, and expired tasks/calendar items). In order to archive your inbox, notes, and drafts, you must first set it manually. For each folder you want archived (and also each sub-folder), again right-click on the folder and select Properties. Then choose the AutoArchive tab. There you can specify the frequency of the archiving and also the destination. In the screenshot below, you can see the available options to you. Changing your settings will help Outlook run smoother and ultimately save you time.

Also be sure to check out our top email management strategies that we posted earlier this month. Read about them here.

LinkedIn Announces New Group Features

Last year, LinkedIn released its Groups feature that allowed any user to participate in discussions about certain topics. More recently, they allowed users to follow groups, "like" discussions, and other similar features. All of these features were exclusive to users of the social network, but as of today, they are now open to the public.

Now the administrator of each group can decide if they would like it to be found in search engines, as well as on LinkedIn. It is no longer required to be a member of each group in order to view it. When this option is chosen, every group member will be notified so they then can decide if they would like to remain a member of the open forum. Only future discussions will be publicly viewable, but all past ones will still be disclosed for members only. These features are relatively similar to those on Facebook, as LinkedIn becomes accessible to those who are and are not members.

Read the complete article from TechCrunch.