Encryption

Over the past two weeks I have been busy encrypting computers for several small businesses. Apparently their corporate offices decided to crack down on all of their members to prevent the company from becoming one of many companies, including the government to have lost sensitive customer information to the world. Encryption is a simple method of ensuring that the contents of your computer cannot be accessed without the password. This is very different then the standard windows password which offers very little security. I can with very limited hacking skills be past a windows password in the time it takes to reboot twice. However a properly encrypted computer can become impossible to access.  

If you have any sensitive information on your computers like customer information I highly recommend you look into encrypting. With Windows 10 the best option is to upgrade to pro and use Bitlocker. Any other system I recommend using the free software Veracrypt. Veracrypt can be used with Windows 10 but because of the way Windows 10 can perform its upgrades I fear that it can cause issues, creating a difficult situation.

Scams

So the other day a friend of mine called me with an issue.  It started when "HP support" called his wife saying that her network was infected.  They proceed to gain remote access to her computer and started to do who knows what. At this point her husband came home and she excitedly told him that HP is fixing her computer.  He immediately became suspicious and accidentally hung up.  However, the helper still had access and proceeded to change the password of her windows account preventing her from being able to login.

Quickly and wisely he powered off the computer, and gave me a call before any further damage could be done. So the moral of the story is that HP, Microsoft, Yahoo, Samsung or any other company is not going to give you a call personally to help you out. Think about it, you probably couldn't even get help from them if you tried and called them.  If one of these scammers calls just tell them you'll have your IT guy a call to check it out and hang up.  If you are worried that you actually might have a problem give me a call and I'll see about putting your mind at ease.

On a similar note be aware of any pop ups while you are surfing the web saying your computer is infected, they are just as unlikely to be real and are a scam to sell you some fake software as another friend of mine found out.  He called me in a panic one day, which after I arrived to evaluate the situation I discovered that he was running Linux which that has a low chance of viruses.

Jason

3-2-1 Backup

Among I.T. enthusiasts and experts there is a saying about backups, 3 copies, 2 separate mediums, 1 offsite.  To break it down, one copy is easily lost, two copies in the same building can be lost with a localized event, and by having that one offsite then you can almost guarantee you won't lose your data.  For most home users I would bet that their photos are the most important thing on their computer, personally I have >32,000 photos.  In the past local events meant you had a loss of memories and history, this no longer has to be the case.

For the average user I recommend a couple of different things.

1. Use an external USB hard drive that is always connected and has some software always copying your valuable data over.  Be sure you leave the original file on the computer.  Or if you are like me have many computers on a network copying files around.
2. Use an offsite storage system there are many free options and paid options.
   1. For Photos only
      1. Google Photos has an automated backup software for PC.  It is unlimited storage but limited in the size of the photo.  If it is to big it will resize it, the resized photo is still good enough for almost any use case.  But it is not original. 1080P videos can also be saved this way as well
      2. For Amazon Prime Members they have unlimited photo storage as well no size limit that I know of.  NO videos though
      3. Yahoo owns Flicker which offers 1TB of photo storage, I'm not sure about video but 1TB of photos will take you a long time to fill up.
   2. For all your file needs
      1. DropBox/Google Drive/Microsoft One Drive/iCloud and similar services will usually work well but the free storage is limited and you have to pay for more storage. 
      2. Carbonite/Crash Plan and other paid services for around $60-80 a year you can get unlimited storage of just about any file size and type for a single computer.
3. Get your data off your phone!!!! 
   1. I can't count the number of people that have lost photos because they dropped their phone some where to make it completely unusable. (toilets, sinks, rivers, lakes, tubs, and pools)

My personal method is:

• An extra internal drive dedicated to backups of my primary storage drive
• Google Photos, I use an android phone I love how from my phone I can see any photo I've ever taken.  Plus Google Photos does some serious image recognition indexing and makes your photos searchable without lifting a finger.  
• Microsoft One Drive.  I used Carbonite in the past but I found for an extra $20 a year I went from having unlimited storage for one computer to having 1TB (darn close to unlimited) of storage, plus the latest version of Microsoft Office products for five computers and five devices, by subscribing to Office365.

Password Management

With the sheer number of hacks and attacks out there it is very likely at some point one of your accounts has been compromised somewhere.  This constant threat makes it imperative that we use multiple passwords across the web.  We can't trust the company we are using to not mess up somewhere and loose control of our account login.  If you are sharing your passwords between your bank and some random car forum then you are a prime target.  Security experts all say you should never reuse passwords and that they should be super long with crazy characters like, )(*:LKUIkjasdfijui*(&U3.  If you are like me and can't remember what you had for lunch yesterday and have hundreds of passwords to remember then those security experts are smoking something. 

However, there are ways to meet the security experts expectations. The easiest way I have found is with one master password to control all the other passwords at a site called LastPass.  LastPass will install on your phone and computer with no issues and ensure you have access to all your passwords at any time.  The people at LastPass know what they are doing with ensuring all your passwords are safe, by not knowing your master password they can never compromise your passwords.  In fact if you forget your master password it's all over for you and the only option they have is to delete your account and start over.  They are capable of auditing all your accounts and informing you when one of them has been compromised and recommending you change your password.  There are other solutions Keepass, 1password and a few others.  I don't know them all and I don't have experience with them but LastPass I have done the research on and use daily and trust them to have the encryption right.