Saturday, May 30, 2009

Computer Safety Thoughts

Computer Safety in the Workplace

As a business owner, one of the headaches you will face is your computer.  Now the computer is supposed to be a helpful tool for your business.  They said it would save you lots of money in reduced paper costs and make your employees more efficient.  What many business owners fail to realize is that their computer could be a real serious risk to their business, if not handled correctly.

 

Imagine this as a business owner.  You are surfing the web for information and all of a sudden your screen goes funny for a second.  There is now a screen on the computer that is telling you that your computer is infected.  You start clicking everywhere to get rid of that screen, but it’s a real problem.  You finally get the screens shut down and think it’s all over.  That was close. 

 

Then all of a sudden you get a call from a business friend telling you that your business is now advertising Viagra-like products.  You are apparently now the poster person for some enhancement product.  As a matter of fact, all your contacts on the computer have gotten a “great” E-mail from you, and some are not pleased at all to say the least.  Your computer has been hacked and used to send out E-mails that you were not even aware of.  Your contact list has been compromised.  What has happened?  How could this have been prevented?

 

While you were surfing the web, you stumbled upon a web page that contained malicious code that downloaded unwanted programs onto your computer.  You were infected by a virus.  That virus redirected your computer to other web sites to download more garbage.  Then the unknown E-mails started happening without your knowledge.  You just violated the Privacy Act by unknowingly sending out your customer E-mail addresses.  Now your computer is a cess pool of viruses and the only fix is to wipe the hard drive clean.  There goes all your data, if you did not back it up before all this happened.  Computer repair shops see this everyday.  It’s a big part of what they have to deal with.

 

So what can you do to avoid this problem in the first place?  Computer safety just does not happen; it’s planned.  Let’s look at some of the things that we should be doing:

 

  • Update the Microsoft Windows Patches on a regular basis.  Hackers try to take advantage of security flaws that are not fixed on your computer.
  • Use up to date anti-virus and anti-spyware programs.  Find a good program and keep it updated.  Updates should come automatically, but you should check every now and then to make sure they are working.
  • Use a router with a built in physical firewall to keep things from going out of your business network.
  • Back up your files on a regular basis.  It’s not a matter of if, but only a matter of when.
  • Don’t be click happy and click on everything you see.  This especially applies to E-mail.  Those blue hyperlinks in the body of the E-mail might vary well launch a virus or some sort of malicious program.
  • Your employees could be your greatest risk to your network.  Make sure they understand safe computer practices and that they are following them.  There is a reason why YouTube.com and other sites need to be blocked in a work environment.  The media that they are using might be bringing in a virus that will wipe your network out.

 

It would be a good idea to have one person in the workplace put in charge of looking after the computers to make sure they are safe.  Education of employees is another good thing to put in place.  Don’t allow ignorance to be responsible for taking your computer down and putting you out of business.

 

Alpha Computer Training


No comments: