Tuesday Tip – Passwords and USBs – Beware!

by Cheryl Sklar

We at Network 1 know that we have great engineers.  In addition to all the knowledge that they have in helping to solve computer problems, they often give us great suggestions for our Tuesday Tips.  Thank you to two of our guys, Alan Schwartz and Eddy Levin, for the following suggestions.

Divide and Conquer Columns in Excel4

Passwords:

We all know how important it is to use passwords with so much information flying around cyberspace.  Here’s a great article from Tony about Managing Strong Passwords – a great reminder on how to choose a good password.  On the flip side of that, here is a list of top 10 passwords NOT to use:

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It is good policy to create passwords with at least 8 characters, mixing capital and lower case letters, and special characters.  This article, Please Don’t Use These Passwords, Sincerely, the Internet, gives you some good suggestions on using and protecting your passwords.

USB Flash Drives:

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There are many fake USB drives prevalent out in the business world.  The Chinese started the trend by using smaller chips in place of bigger ones to make money (ex. a 512MB to look like a 1GB drive).  They would often put keyloggers on the devices, enabling the recording of anything you type using your keyboard and acting as spyware.  Pretty scary!  Here’s a helpful article detailing some of the findings on this subject.

A lot of conferences hand out free USB flash drives.  In addition to most of that space being taken up by their company advertisements, there can be viruses and malware on those drives that can affect your computers.  Here’s an interesting article to support that concern about thumb drive dangers. So beware.  There’s not really an easy way to tell if those USBs are bad or not.  The best practice is just to not use them.  Take home a fancy pen or some other type of fun, promotional product and buy your USB drives from a reputable office supply company.

12-175Cheryl Sklar  With over 26 years of experience in sales,  marketing and general coordination, Cheryl uses her varied organizational skills to enhance the behind the scenes workings of Network 1.  She strives to help things run smoothly wherever she can.

csklar@network1consulting.com or 404.997.7641

Network 1 Consulting is a 17-year-oldIT Support company in Atlanta, GA.  We become – or augment – the IT department for law firms and medical practices.  Our IT experts can fix computers – but what our clients really value are the industry-specific best practices we bring to their firms.  This is especially important with technology, along with regulations and cyber threats, changing so rapidly.  We take a proactive approach to helping our clients use technology to gain and keep their competitive advantage.

 

Tony Rushin Headshot

Tony Rushin: In his role as VP of sales & marketing, he is responsible for hiring, managing and coaching the sales team and always staying on top of (and meeting) the needs of clients. Under his leadership, the company has steadily grown each year.

Network 1 designs, builds and supports the IT you need to run your business more securely, productively and successfully. Whether you want to outsource all of your IT needs to a reliable, responsive, service-oriented company, or need to supplement the work of your internal IT staff, we will carefully evaluate where you are now, discuss where you want to go and implement and support a plan to get you there with as little interruption as possible.

2 Comments

  1. Tuesday Tip: Those Pesky Apple Charger Cables on February 17, 2015 at 12:11 pm

    […] about the electronic items you buy today. Check out last week’s tip on the dangers of using the wrong USB thumb drive.  So when it comes to buying charging cables you’re probably better off paying for the Apple […]

  2. […] Tuesday Tip: Passwords and USBs – Beware! […]

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